An Immortal On The Hellmouth
by Davros
Summary: BTVSHighlander crossover. A change of destiny for Xander Harris results in some rather startling changes over the years, starting with his date of birth and his identity.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N This is an idea that's been bugging me for a while now and I decided to write out an introductory chapter to try and get it out of my head and see if it worked anyway. I'm really not all that sure about it. My Highlander knowledge is really restricted to the original film (the only one worth watching really) and some sporadic bits of the series I've caught here and there. Mostly I'll be taking my Highlander canon from the film with bits of the series mixed in for colour or where the film skimps on detail, so that means Immortals work somewhat differently than you might be used to. For a start, there's no temporary death. Immortals just don't die, period. You can see that in the breathing underwater scene when Connor is training. They can still be disabled for a while though. If a vampire drains all of their blood then they'll be knocked out till it's been regenerated, for example. Even an Immortal can't function without any blood in their body as I see it.**

**As for his weapons? Well short swords fell out of fashion for a reason. He carries one around because it's easier to conceal but when he knows he's going into battle he carries something a bit heavier though he varies it based on what he's going into. He's not as attached to any particular weapon as most Immortals. He's all about the practicality and using what's best for the situation. **

**And his age? There are a couple of pretty obvious hints if you know what you're looking for.**

"Not long till we reach Sunnydale now, Alex," said the altogether too perky social worker – Alice I thought her name was - without taking her eyes off the road.

"I can barely contain my excitement," I replied, having long since given up any hope I had of getting this infernal woman to use my chosen name.

"Now don't be like that. You know you couldn't have stayed in LA after what happened," said Alice.

"I could have just taken the GED exam and then there'd be no need for me to come here," I said, deeply bored by the whole conversation.

"You're not old enough to take the GED yet, Alex."

I almost laughed at that. Almost. "If you say so."

"Aren't you looking forward to meeting your new foster family?"

"I'm quite capable of looking after myself," I replied with a little venom. "And if that isn't acceptable then I had a perfectly good family in LA."

"And if that were true then you wouldn't have ended up in the situation you did."

"Hardly my fault that some lunatic attacked me with a sword, was it?"

"But did you really have to decapitate him?"

Stupid Immortals who go through with challenges in broad daylight and in front of witnesses.

"Didn't have much choice really," said Xander with a scowl.

"Hmm. If you say so."

Being an Immortal who died in his teenage years really wasn't much fun. And whose stupid idea had it been to take a break and spend a few years going through school again? Oh yeah. Stupid me. Damn good thing I had excellent lawyers on retainer or I'd still be in prison by the time the gathering started. Bloody California. I was seriously considering heading back to England for my next identity. Or maybe Italy – it had been a very long time since I'd been there and it would be nice to see the closest thing there was nowadays to the country of my birth again.

* * *

The social worker was long since gone and I was wondering just what the hell Id gotten myself into. I'd felt it as soon as he'd came into the town: the hellmouth. My magical abilities were somewhat atrophied from lack of use over the last century or so but I'd still picked up on that easily enough. Bloody wonderful. I'd tired of dealing with this sort of thing a long time ago and now here I was on top of the hellmouth without even my trusty old gladius. I was definitely going to have to get on to my people and have my weapons shipped through ASAP and to hell with what my foster family thought of it all.

As for my foster family . . . disgusting alcohol soaked creatures that they were, I was pretty damn surprised that they'd been allowed to foster. Really I was surprised that they even wanted to foster, though I supposed that the money they would make from it would account for that. I, an Immortal older than this accursed nation and its idiotic legal system, was now consigned into the care of a care of a pair of drunken old sots because of some idiot challenger who attacked me in broad daylight in front of the high school.

It was pathetic really. Consigned into the care of idiots who would have been far beneath my attention in any of my previous identities. These were the sort of people I would have rejected out of hand if the conscripters had dragged them in. No disciple, no drive to succeed, and absolutely no skills to speak of apparently. Absolutely useless like far too many people in this day and age. Perhaps I was being unfair – they probably wouldn't have been allowed to grow so soft in my time – but it was hard not to judge them harshly even so quickly.

Anyway, the house they lived in was at least acceptable. One of them had at least retained enough self-respect to keep their lodgings at least moderately sanitary and I was most thankful for that. I don't think I could abided living in a flea-pit of a house like so many of these people's ilk occupy. I was altogether too many years distant from my early lives to tolerate that. My time as an Englishman had eroded my ability to rough out unsanitary living conditions on anything other than a temporary basis unfortunately. Perhaps I was growing soft in my old age.

The room they had given me – grudgingly, as if it was some major boon in their opinion – was of a moderate size and sparsely furnished. A single bed, a writing table, and a small wardrobe made up the majority of the furnishings in the room. Adequate but minimal. That described pretty much everything I'd seen about the Harris family really. They did the bare minimum they could get away with and then went back to their bottle. Even that infernal social worker seemed taken aback by them.

It's a good thing I wasn't really a child because these people were by no stretch of the imagination good parenting material, I thought, as I stowed away what little gear I had left outside of my various stashes. It was mostly just clothing though I also had my journal, the latest in a long line of journals I'd kept since I was made aware of my immortality. It was a risk to have something like that round but writing it in Latin kept the vast majority of people from reading it even if they laid hands on it.

* * *

I was out of bed with the rise of the sun the next day and quickly ran through an exercise routine that would keep me in fighting trim. For someone like me, who lived and died through his martial prowess, it was of the utmost importance to keep in good condition or I would find myself easy prey for the next murderous head-hunter who passed through town. Not that I really expected to face many challenges from my fellow Immortals while I lived here. It was too small a town to attract much traffic from the hunters amongst my kind and the hellmouth's natural energies would obscure my quickening to those who did pass through unless they were especially skilled in detecting such things.

Unsurprisingly my new 'parents' were not out of bed in time to see me leave for my first at Sunnydale High School. Yet again I was thankful of my being rather older than I appeared and neither wanting nor needing parental attention because any child who came here desiring such would not be receiving it. It was helpful really as it allowed to phone home and make arrangements for the delivery of my usual weaponry and to check up on the people I was unable to spend time with under my new circumstances. I, along with some of the people from the families who worked for me, had been raising a girl I'd found being rather shabbily treated in Boston several years ago. She was like a daughter to me – as strange as that seemed at times with my youthful appearance – and I missed her dreadfully, but it would be several months before I would be sure enough of my position here to go see her.

Nothing happened of note on my way to school though I did see a blonde girl who appeared to be vaguely familiar talking to her mother in their car as I walked up the road leading to the school entrance but I shrugged it off. I'd known a lot of blondes over the years and I couldn't place this one so I doubted it was anyone particularly important, especially seeing as that she was still a schoolgirl.

* * *

"Alexander Lucius Smith, Sophomore, late of Hemery High in Los Angeles, held back due to being incarcerated in juvenile hall for manslaughter. Ah. Well, I do hope you're not going to kill anyone else while you're here, Alex," said Principle Flutie, a slightly overweight, weak-featured man.

"It was self defence," I said. "Only in California could I be imprisoned for killing someone who attacked me with a lethal weapon in broad daylight with numerous witnesses watching on."

"Hmm. Well, you wouldn't be here if you weren't safe, I suppose. Welcome to Sunnydale, Alex."

"I prefer to be called Xander, actually, Principle Flutie," I replied tersely.

"All the kids here are free to call me Bob."

"I'd rather not."

Flutie looked a little flustered by that but he quickly gathered himself. "Well, that's your choice. None of the other kids do either. Anyway, your transcripts seems to be in order other than that little hiccup so I'll wish you good luck with your stay here. A clean slate here, Xander, that's what we offer our students and I do hope you'll take advantage of that opportunity."

"I'm sure I will," I said blandly, already debating the pros and cons of faking my death in the quiet of my own mind.

"We want to service your needs, and help you to respect our needs. And if your needs and our needs don't mesh . . . "

"I'm sure they'll mesh well enough, Principal. I wish to complete my education and leave this place as quickly as possible and I'm sure you wish something similar," I said looking him in the eye all the while. He gave me a tremulous smile and a nervous laugh in response to that and told me to pick up a timetable from the receptionist as I left. I was quick to obey.

As I left Flutie's office I heard a sharp intake of breath and then a female voice spoke from just to my side, "Smith?" it said.

I turned to face the voice and saw a young, attractive blonde girl. After a moment I placed the face. "Summers?" I asked. "The cheerleader, right?"

"That's me. Aren't you supposed to be in prison?"

"I was. They've let me out. What are you doing here?" I asked in response.

She actually looked somewhat abashed at that. "I kinda got expelled from Hemery."

"Join the club. Seems they didn't want me back for some reason after what happened," I said. I looked at my watch before speaking again. "See you around, Summers. I've got class to get to."

* * *

My first class – history it turned out to be, strangely enough – passed quickly, though it did seem as if rumours had already started about me and my crimes. How did I guess this? Well the fact that those sitting in neighbouring seats to me flinched away when I sat down kind of gave it away. The topic of the lesson brought many unpleasant memories to the fore. The Black Death had been one of the most singularly unpleasant things I had ever experienced. Even if I couldn't contract the disease myself – something for which I am eternally grateful - it had been an awful time to live in Europe. So much death and so little anyone could do to prevent it.

It was also the first time I experience being burnt at the stake when a village decided that my surviving while my family died meant I was dabbling in some sort of witchcraft. Now that had been the single worst experience of my very long life. If there's a worse way to die than that, I really don't want to experience it. Suffice to say that, when I revived from the trauma that overcame even my Immortal constitution, there was a price in blood exacted from those who burned me. Scared out of their wits as they were I could not just accept such a thing being done to me.

As I left the lesson I saw the Summers girl – Buffy I think her name was, though I was sure my memory must have been failing me because surely no parent would have named their child such – walking away with an expensively dressed brunette girl in front of me. The girl was quite attractive really but her youth and the completely superficial topics of conversation she raised with Summers soon dissuaded me from that opinion.

When the brunette stopped to insult a shy-looking red-headed girl that I decided to step in.

"No wonder you're such a guy magnet. Are you done? " said the Brunette.

"I think you'll find that being a 'guy magnet' is helpful in only one line of employment in the future," I said in a acidic tone of voice. A low blow perhaps but I _despise_ that sort of person and this redhead reminded me of my long-dead sister in her manner.

"And you are?" she responded coldly.

"Alexander Smith," I said softly. "I'm surprised you haven't heard of me. Mostly everyone seems to have."

To her credit she stood her ground, something that most of this schools students would likely have failed to do. "The killer? Wow, Willow, you do attract some guys after all," she said snidely before stalking off with Summers in tow.

Willow looked like she was about ready to run for her life after hearing what the brunette said but I was quick to assuage her fears. "It was self-defence," I said. "He attacked me with a sword for some reason and ended up dead."

"Oh."

"I'll see you around, Willow."

* * *

I was in the stacks in the library hunting down course texts when I accidentally on purpose eavesdropped on the conversation.

"Okay, what's the sitch?" said a familiar female voice a moment after the library doors banged open.

"Sorry?" asked the librarian, Giles, from the stacks on the others side of the library.

"You heard about the dead guy, right? The dead guy in the locker? " said the female. I poked my head out from around the corner at that point and saw that it was Summers. What did Summers care about some dead guy and why would she be talking about it to a librarian? A librarian who happens to be a stuffy old Brit wearing tweed. Ah. Slayer. Summers is the Slayer. Some sort of cosmic joke, obviously. I darted back around behind the stacks and listened in to see if I could get some useful information.

"Yes. "

"'Cause, it's the weirdest thing. He's got two little, little holes in his neck, and all his blood's been drained. Isn't that bizarre? Aren't you just going, ooo? "

"I was afraid of this. "

"Well, I wasn't! It's my first day! I was afraid that I was gonna be behind in all my classes, that I wouldn't make any friends, that I would have last month's hair. I didn't think there'd be vampires on campus. And I don't care. "

Now that was strange. All the slayers I'd met before this one had been all slay, all the time, with no room for an actual personality. I have to admit that I was most entertained by hearing a Slayer tell her Watcher to bugger off though. It's something that a lot more of them should have done because maybe then they'd have survived more than five minutes trying to fight demons with a pointy stick.

The conversation along the same lines and continued to entertain me greatly. There's just something wonderful about seeing a non-brainwashed Slayer with an actual backbone. Destiny, my arse. Someone created the Slayer at some point and now the Watchers find her, shove a pointy stick in her hands, and tell her to go slay with approximately zero backup. Disgusting. A bunch of grown men hiding behind the skirts of a teenage girl who's had some powers dumped on her randomly. How deeply pathetic.

* * *

I did some quick research before I left the school that day, looking for likely feeding spots for vampires. There weren't many in a town this small and one place in particular stood out as an easy mark for vampires on the hunt: The Bronze. A club full of stupid. Hormonal teenagers that also happens to be far enough away from anything else that a bit of screaming would go unnoticed. Perfect for the vermin.

So that was why I, someone older than this nation by an order of magnitude, found myself heading towards a teenage club. I just knew that this was going to be all kinds of fun. I mean what wouldn't be great about spending my night with a bunch of children who were too scared to come within ten yards of me? Oh yeah, I was really looking forward to it. Such a shame that I ran into Buffy before I actually entered the club. She looked a little frantic actually.

"Leaving already, Summers?" I asked.

"My name's Buffy," she said absently. "Have you seen Willow?"

So much for my memory failing me then. What a truly atrocious name. "I'm afraid not. Is she in trouble?"

"I think so," she said. "I need to find her."

Ah. The tense set of her shoulders, the obvious readiness to fight. "It's a vampire, isn't it?"

The way her eyes widened at that was quite comedic really. "Uh . . . no. No vampire here. No, sir. No vampires in Sunnydale."

I raised an eyebrow at that. "No vampires on the hellmouth? Right. Come on, Buffy. Time's a wasting and it looks like you have slaying to do."

Couldn't resist slipping that in just to see the look on her face. It did not disappoint.

"Was there a... a school bulletin? Was it i-in the newspaper? Is there anyone in this town who doesn't know I'm the Slayer?"

"No, I just overheard you talking in the library."

"Oh."

"Not very secret-identity of you to talk about it so openly really. And tell Giles to lose the tweed. It makes it so very obvious to anyone who's heard of the Slayer."

She looked completely lost. "Right." And then she shook her head and the Slayer was back. "I don't have time for this."

And I followed her.

* * *

"Leave us alone!" we heard Willow cry as we walked through the cometary. As fast as I was to react, Buffy was faster. She was off like a shot and I was left lagging behind. Damn superhumans.

"You're not going anywhere until we've fed!" said the female vampire as I caught up to Buffy and entered the crypt. Ah, I recognised that one. Darla. Willow was screaming and scrabbling away from her.

"Well, this is nice. I-it's a little bare, but a dash of paint, a few throw pillows... call it home!" said Buffy, moving behind the coffin. If I'd had to guess, I'd say she was trying to draw the vampires away from the rest of us.

"Hey, Darla," I said. "Long time, no see."

"You!" she exclaimed, so surprised that her demon-face slipped away. "I killed you!"

"You tried. Came pretty close, too. Certainly not my proudest moment."

"I drained you dry!"

"And it was highly uncomfortable. A truly harsh lesson on the consequences of inebriation," I said, enjoying myself altogether too much. "Then again, considering how much fun I had beforehand . . . it might have been worth it."

She growled at me then. She actually growled.

"You slept with a _vampire_?" asked a horrified sounding Buffy.

"I was drunk!"

"That's gross!"

Unfortunately, Darla didn't give me time to elaborate on what happened as she launched herself at me. It took all my years of combat-honed reflexes to dodge her and not get reduced to a smear on the crypt wall. Even with my considerable power that would have taken a long time to heal from.

"Now would be a good time to step in, Buffy," I said, as she dusted the male vampire. I dodged a powerful punch aimed at my head. "Lacking weapons here."

And then I was airborne and a moment later I slammed into the opposite wall of the crypt and all the air was knocked out of my lungs as I felt a rib break. "Ouch," I said from my crumpled up position on the floor.

"Xander, get Jesse and Willow and get out of here," yelled Buffy as she moved to engage the extremely large vampire who'd just thrown me across the crypt like a sack of potatoes.

"So not a problem," I muttered as I levered myself off the floor, wincing in pain as my rib fixed itself. That always hurts. "Come on," I yelled to them as I made for the door. "Time to leave."

They followed and we went as fast as we could but Jesse couldn't move quickly with as much blood lost as he had and we were soon cornered by a group of vampires.

"Ah. Willow, Jesse, run. I'll hold these creatures off," I said, my voice glacial.

"But they'll kill you!" said Willow.

"Killing me is easier said then done, now get the hell out of here," I said. They hesitated, looking fearful. "GO!" I yelled. And they went.

The vampires circled around surrounding me and for the first time in almost a century I opened myself fully to my magic. I'm not the strongest wiccan on the planet but I've had a very long time to learn how to make full use of what powers I have. These vampires were all relatively young, thankfully. If any of them had been as powerful as Darla or that big one who threw me across the crypt I might have been in trouble.

I drew myself up to my full height and my posture abruptly shifted from a care-free teenager to the battle-hardened warrior I was. "In the name of God, impure souls of the living dead shall be banished into eternal damnation. Amen," I said in a crisp, upper-class English tone of voice.

"Hellsing," hissed one of the vampires.

"Van Helsing actually," I said. "Inflammare!" I yelled with a wave of my hand and one of the vampires burst into flames, letting out a brief scream before dissolving into dust.

The vampires rushed me then, obviously feeling a great deal less confident now than they had before I'd revealed one of my identities and torched one of them, but I was already moving. The first vampire to reach me went down hard, clutching at the knee I'd just smashed to pieces with a low kick that bent it in a direction it was never meant to go. A second vampire grabbed for my neck but I caught his arm and yanked it out of its socket before slamming my knuckles into its throat, dropping the young vampire to the ground as it instinctively tried to draw breath.

Two more vampires fell to my magic before my magic levels dropped and the remaining vampires again rushed me. I managed to disable the two of them that were able to attack but I really needed a weapon. A quick look around the area showed me a tree and i quickly tore a small branch off to use as a makeshift stake. The vampires, being the idiotic sewer rats that this breed are, charged me again, and this time I destroyed them. One ran straight into the branch when I sidestepped his rush and the other was smashed down to the ground with a blow to the head before I staked him in the back.

The last vampire, the one whose knee I destroyed, attempted to drag himself away to safety but I was not going to allow any of this filth to escape if I could help it.

"May God have absolutely no mercy on you whatsoever, demon trash," I said as I slammed the branch down into its chest and dusted the filthy creature. Old habits die hard and I was slipping back into my Van Helsing personality rather easily.

"Where are the others?" asked Buffy, jogging up behind me.

"Not sure. I told them to run when we ran into some vampires," I said absently, tossing the branch aside as I did. "Probably went back to the Bronze or home, I suppose."

I turned to face Buffy and saw her giving me an evaluating, suspicious look, stake held loosely at her side but obviously ready to bring to bare if I made a hostile move. "What are you?" she said. I knew that moment that unless I came up with a very good story then I was going to get one Buffy Summers sized slaying and hand to hand combat with someone who possessed superhuman speed, strength, and endurance was never fun.

"Have you ever heard the phrase: In the end, there can be only one?"

"Uh, no. Sounds like something from a cheesy movie or TV commercial."

"I'm not surprised really but I had to check. My kind are somewhat reclusive by nature and we have grown to be very, very good at concealing ourselves from human society."

"You're not answering my question."

I pondered the question for a moment. How much should I tell her? I had a lot of history going back a lot of years and I didn't really want to talk about it, not with someone I didn't really know. "Is it so hard to believe for you, a Slayer, that there are other humans out there who were born different? With special abilities that others would fear? Or desire? I'd really rather not talk about it. There are many unpleasant memories down that path."

She agreed to my request after a few moments of thought and then I accompanied her back to the Bronze where we found Willow and Jesse. After a very brief conversation we persuaded them to accompany us to the school library for an explanation of what had just happened to them.

* * *

"This world is older than any of you know. Contrary to popular mythology, it did not begin as a paradise. For untold aeons demons walked the Earth. They made it their home, their... their Hell. But in time they lost their purchase on this reality. The way was made for mortal  
animals, for, for man. All that remains of the old ones are vestiges, certain magicks, certain creatures . . . " said Giles.

"And vampires. " weighed in Buffy.

"Okay, this is where I have a problem. See, because we're talking about vampires. We're having a talk with vampires in it," said a very sceptical sounding Jesse.

"You have a bite-mark on your neck from where Darla drank your blood. Got a better explanation for it?" I asked him. He looked stymied by that.

"No. No, th-those weren't vampires, those were just guys in thundering need of a facial. Or maybe they had rabies. It could have been rabies. A-and that guy turning to dust? Just a trick of light." Jesse gave her a look at that. "That's exactly what I said the first time I saw a vampire. Well, after I was done with the screaming part. "

"Oh, I, I need to sit down," said a very out-of-it sounding Willow.

"You are sitting down," said Buffy.

"Oh. Good for me."

"So vampires are demons? " asked Jesse.

"Most of them," I cut in before Giles could respond. "The non-demonic breed is both very rare and very unlikely to turn up in a place as infested with the demonic breed as this town apparently is."

"You seem to know a lot about this sort of thing," said a suspicious sounding Giles.

"Yeah. That Darla chick seemed to know you," said Jesse.

"Could we not talk about the time I got drunk and allowed a vampire to seduce me?" I asked. "It's not exactly my proudest moment, you know?"

"You were seduced by a vampire and _survived_?" asked a gob-smacked Giles.

I smiled. "I'm hard to kill," I replied. "Anyway, shouldn't you be explaining why little old Buffy was tossing around vampires like rag dolls?"

The glare I got from Buffy at that was truly epic.

"She's the Slayer," said Giles simply.

"What's that?" asked Jesse.

"She's the one that people like him, the Watchers, hide behind and expect to do all the fighting," I added helpfully.

"For as long as there have been vampires, there's been the Slayer. One girl in all the world, a Chosen One," said Giles, glaring at me all the while.

"He loves doing this part," said Buffy.

"Alright. The Slayer hunts vampires, Buffy is a Slayer, don't tell anyone. Well, I think that's all the vampire information you need," finished Giles.

I snorted. "How about telling them how to protect themselves if they're attacked again? What precautions to take to make attacks less likely?"

"That would just encourage them to try and fight the vampires!"

"And the problem with that would be . . . ?"

"It's the Slayer's destiny to fight the vampires not theirs. They're just children."

"They're old enough that they'd have been married with children in some cultures. They're old enough that they could join the British military. They're no younger than Buffy. Age is not an issue," I said stiffly. "And as for destiny? The hell with destiny. Prophecy is just a bunch of words written in dusty old books by old men who died long ago. At best, it's a guideline. At worst, it's actively destructive."

Giles just gaped at me. There really is no part of tormenting Watchers that isn't fun. I'd almost forgotten how much fun it could be but it's all coming back.

"Quite frankly I don't think you can afford to turn away any helpers. The idiotic rules about Slayers working alone is why they die so quickly and to so little effect normally."

Buffy, Willow, and Jesse were swivelling back and forth staring at the person speaking as if it was a tennis match by this point.

"I see your point," replied Giles. "In fact, I agree. But untrained school children are not my idea of appropriate comrades in arms for a Slayer."

"That's true but you're not going to get any better coming along. Make the best of what you have."

"I can help with research," chipped in Willow.

"And I can, uh," said Jesse trailing off. "Well, I can hold your coat and cheer you on."

I grinned. "Don't worry, Jesse. I'll teach you how to fight."

"And what do you know about combat?" asked Giles giving me a piercing gaze.

"Quite a bit."

"He was holding his own against that Darla chick before the big guy threw him into a wall," said Buffy.

"And he held off those vampires when he told me and Willow to run," said Jesse. "How did you get out of that anyway?"

"They were pretty new so they weren't the strongest of vampires and I know a few good tricks."

"Be that as it may, I'm still leery of trusting anyone who has been convicted of manslaughter, especially at such a young age," said Giles.

"Hey, it's hardly _my_ fault that some lunatic with a sword attacked me, is it? So he ended up dead – big loss. You attack someone with a lethal weapon then you have to be prepared for the consequences."

"And you just so happened to be carrying a sword around with you to defend yourself?" asked Giles dryly.

"What can I say? I like to be prepared. Regular boy scout here," said Xander and then he topped it off with a picture-perfect boy-scout style salute. "Dib-dib."

Jesse let slip a snort of laughter before he restrained himself at Giles's glare. Buffy just laughed and ignored the glare.

"Look, it was self-defence – read the trial transcripts for yourself if you don't believe me - and I've already proven tonight that I'm no friend of vampires. Isn't that enough?"

"For now it will have to. But if you betray our trust . . . "

"Message received loud and clear, librarian-guy. No chopping people's heads off if I like mine attached."

* * *

I felt immeasurably more comfortable the next day at school with my normal weapons ready at hand. My gladius in a hidden pocket sewn in the lining of my long coat, a silver dagger tucked into each of my ankle sheaths, and a cross hanging from my neck – all blessed by the Archbishop of Canterbury – made me feel considerably safer than I had the previous day with nothing more than my fists and my wits between me and a grisly, if temporary, end. I'm just strange that way.

I made a mental note to pay Peter a bonus for his prompt delivery. It would have been highly inconvenient to have to face vampires with the pointy sticks that watchers generally consider to be adequate weaponry. Combine my usual walking-around weaponry with what I had stashed at my new 'home' and I was well equipped to deal with pretty much anything this town has to offer. You'd think I was paranoid but they really are out to get me and have been for a very long time.

The school day was uneventful. Lots of research into what exactly 'The Harvest' was till we found out that it was some crazy ritual to release a particularly old and powerful master vampire that was trapped in the hellmouth. Typical vampire fare really, though how this particular maggot had gotten himself trapped in the hellmouth was beyond me. Obviously an amateur when it came to magic.

The details of the ritual were rather simple. Vampire gets dubbed the vessel, vampire drains lots of people, master vampire gets the power boost from the draining, and the master breaks free. Kill the vessel, kill the ritual. Easy.

* * *

"It's locked," said Buffy.

Or not.

"We're too late," said Giles as I adjusted my grip on the broadsword I was carrying.

"I didn't know I was gonna get grounded!" whined Buffy.

"Can you break it down?" asked Jesse.

"No, not that thing. Um... You guys try the back entrance, and I'll find my own way," said Buffy.

"Uh, see you inside, then," said Giles.

I quickly ran around to the back of the club with the others – or as quick as you can run when you're carrying a broadsword and have enough other weaponry on you to fight a small war - and watched as Willow tried the door.

"No joy," she cried.

"Wonderful," I muttered. "Let me have a go at it," I said. Willow moved aside and I kneeled in font of the door and eyed the lock for a couple of seconds before pulling out a set of lockpicks. "Shouldn't take more than a minute or two," I said as I went to work on the lock.

"You know how to pick locks?" asked Jesse. I nodded, not turning away from the lock that was getting my full concentration. "Cool!"

"I don't think I want to know," said Giles dryly.

"Probably not," I replied absently as I worked. In actuality I'd been taught this by an Immortal thief in exchange for not handing her over to the local authorities when I caught her burgling my house a couple of centuries back. She'd been damn hard to catch even with the Immortal sensing thing we all have and had been a fine teacher once I got past the whole 'you bloody thief, I'll chop your hands off' thing.

A moment later the lock clicked and the door swung open. "Bingo," I said as I put the picks pack in the pocket I'd had them stashed in. "Let's go."

I grabbed my broadsword off the floor and hefted it into a ready position before charging in with the others. When I entered I took a moment to evaluate the situation. There was a fairly large number of vampires scattered around the club but they didn't look all that prepared for a battle and Buffy was keeping the big guy occupied well enough on the stage. She really was quite good but it looked like she hadn't yet realised that trying to punch a vampire out isn't really the most efficient way to go about things.

And with that thought I indulged in the more efficient method of vampire destruction by cleaving the head of the idiot demon who tried to rush me clean off. Really it's Darwinism at work when they rush at someone wielding a broadsword like that. With that idiot dealt with I turned my attention to the crowd and began to usher them out of the now open door with the others.

I turned and saw Buffy deck the vampire she was fighting with a backhand punch before I was abruptly grabbed from behind and had my sword wrenched out of my grip. I immediately slammed my head back into the vampire's face and rolled away when he dropped me. The vampire roared and charged at me but was stopped in his tracks when a cymbal of all things sheared his head off. "Heads up," I said as I looked over to see who had thrown it. Buffy of course. She gave me a quick grin before going back to her fight.

The club was really beginning to empty out now. Buffy was still fighting with the vampire on the stage but it didn't seem that there was that many other vampires left in the club. I saw one of them wrestling with Cordelia, trying to hold her still so he could bite her. Three long strides later and I was grabbing the vampire by the scruff of his neck and throwing him off her. As strong and fast as vampires are, they still weigh no more than a normal human so it wasn't all that difficult.

The vampire hissed in anger and lunged at me. My dodge was slightly too slow and I was slammed to the ground and found myself forced into wrestling with a creature several times stronger than a normal human being. I didn't really stand a chance no matter how well versed I was in the art of battle and I was soon overpowered. The vampire had somehow acquired a stake and the look in his eye as he held me down was pure malice. "See how you like it, bloodbag," he said before slamming the stake down into my heart.

Let me just say, ouch.

The vampire had a very satisfied look on his face as he let go and stood up. That look only grew when I coughed up a mouthful of blood and spat it on the floor next to my head. "Bastard," I muttered as I grabbed the stake and yanked it out of the wound, causing a not-inconsiderable amount of blood to leak out and stain the white shirt I was wearing. Bollocks, another shirt ruined. The vampire looked rather amused as I forced myself onto my feet, thinking it was a futile gesture.

I guess his opinion changed when the wound abruptly stopped bleeding and healed over with a few sparks of lightning.

"What the hell are you?" it yelled, stumbling backwards away from me.

I didn't bother to reply as I pulled my gladius out and stalked towards him, backing him into the club wall. He must have realised how stupid it was to allow himself to be pushed into that position as he lunged at me to attack but my blade was already moving and cut through his neck like a hot knife through butter.

Taking a quick look around the club, I realised it was over. Buffy was standing over a large pile of dust and the other three looked to be in varying states of dishevelment after dealing with whatever they'd ran into. I rubbed my chest to try and do something for the lingering soreness and sheathed my gladius before heading over to where I'd lost my broadsword and trying to find the damn thing. Thankfully it turned up hidden underneath the pool table after a couple of minutes searching.

"Bloody vampires," I muttered as I scooped it up. "Only I could get sent to vampire-town, USA, when social services got their claws into me."

"You're hurt," gasped Willow as I joined the group.

"A mere flesh wound," I said, waving her off. "It bled a lot but it's already healed."

"Really?" asked Giles. "It looks somewhat more serious than that to me."

"I heal fast," I said dismissively. "It's not a problem. Check for yourself if you want."

And he did and he found no wound at all. Just a red mark over my heart where the skin was still slightly irritated.

* * *

My foster parents didn't even notice that I was covered in my own blood when I went back home that night. In fact, they didn't even notice I'd came home. Real parents of the year material. Helpful though. Explaining why I was covered in my own blood would have been difficult and messing around with someone's memory using magic has never been something I liked doing. It's both rude and dangerous.

Anyway the next day dawned bright and early and there were no swarms of demons rushing out of an open hellmouth, so it was all good. I met up with the rest of the group outside the school just before lessons started that morning just in time to hear Jesse say, "I don't know, something. I mean, the dead rose. We should at least have an assembly."

Giles responded to that with, "people have a tendency to rationalize what they can and forget what they can't. "

"It's best this way," I said. "If people found out about this stuff then we'd have the witch hunts starting up all over again."

"You might be right," admitted Giles. "I've never quite thought of it that way."

Understandable considering that he hadn't lived through the witch hunts and been burnt at the stake.

"Well, I'll never forget it, none of it," said Willow.

"Good! Next time you'll be prepared," said Giles.

Jesse and Willow looked gob-smacked. "Next time? " he said. "Next time is why? " she said.

"We've prevented the Master from freeing himself and opening the Mouth of Hell," said Giles. "That's not to say he's going to stop trying. I'd say the fun is just beginning."

"More vampires? " squeaked Willow.

"Not just vampires. The next threat we face may be something quite different," said Giles looking altogether too cheerful about the whole thing.

"I can hardly wait!" said Buffy.

"We're at the center of a mystical convergence here. We may, in fact, stand between the Earth and its total destruction," said Giles, still looking too cheerful.

"A group of teenagers responsible for keeping the world safe?" I said. "I am filled with confidence."

"Well, I gotta look on the bright side. Maybe I can still get kicked out of school!" said Buffy.

The students moved on to go to class while Giles stayed outside the school.

"Oh, yeah, that's a plan. 'Cause lots of schools aren't on hellmouths," said Jesse.

"Maybe you could blow something up. They're really strict about that," said Willow.

"Decapitation works too," I said.

"I was thinking of a more subtle approach, y'know, like excessive not studying," responded Buffy.

"The Earth is doomed! " I heard Giles say, just at the edge of my hearing. I snickered. Too right.


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: See my new homepage for a more exactly formatted version. Link's in my profile

**Chapter Two: Angel and Head-Hunters. Not a good day.**

It truly was a perverse person who named this town Sunnydale. Honestly, even I couldn't come up with a sicker joke than that, and I have a couple thousand years of morbid humour under my belt. Whoever founded this oh so charming little town must have known what sort of a place they were building on. It's kinda hard to not notice when the dead start crawling out of their graves and chowing down on the locals. Well, you'd think so anyway. Maybe I'm being too optimistic about people and their capacity for rational observation and thought.

Coming from someone who was burnt at the stake for not dying of a horrible disease, that's saying something.

Anyway, it's suffice to say that this is not my favourite place in the world. Really, the only people who could enjoy living in this place are demons, dark wizards, and people who are completely blind to the supernatural. Thinking about it, that's probably a fair chunk of the world's population right there – the capacity to understand and deal with the supernatural has been getting less and less common as humanity grows and advances. For someone like me, who's senses are wide open to the supernatural forces, it feels like I'm living on top of an open sewer. Needless to say: Not Pleasant.

On the plus side, I'll be able to do some kickass dark magic with the hellmouth to draw on. Maybe I'll even be able to cast a Dragon Slave without knocking myself flat out for once. It would probably make the watcher get all pissy though, and as fun as jerking those idiots around can be I don't need a wetworks team after me. It's not so much that they could actually take me out, but being shot _hurts_. That and I really don't need that sort of attention. Last time I started tossing around that sort of power I ended up having to leave a very nice setup I had going with my faking my death every few decades and posing as my own son. You could get away with a lot in the British Empire as long as you had plenty of money to throw around but that was just too much attention to keep it going any longer.

Well, anyway, it makes meditating to rebuild my connection to the various sources of power I used to call on when I was a regularly practising sorcerer less than pleasant and a great deal less effective than I'd like. It's times like this that I really envy the wand wavers, they just wave that stupid bit of wood around and yell a few latin words and they're sorted. Magic's about as difficult as tying your shoelaces for them. Obnoxious bastards really don't have a clue how good they have it. Or could have it. Their society's so messed up that they'll probably die off in a couple of centuries from inbreeding, the idiots. Not that I won't have a great time poking fun at the fifteen fingered spawn of the wizarding world's finest families when the time comes.

I gave up the day's meditations as a waste of time at that point and started getting ready for a spot of demon hunting. The daggers and the calf holsters that go with them were the first pieces of equipment I strapped on. Can 't go wrong with a good blessed dagger when it comes to backup weapons. Then I pulled on my bracers. Those are some expensive pieces of kit, I had them made out of the toughest materials modern science could provide for me and the result is was a pair of bracers that were strong enough to deflect a sword strike but were still fairly lightweight.

After the bracers are on comes the cross, blessed silver kept from my days in England. Very nice. I'm not actually Christian but it makes a convenient religious symbol to tote around and they all work against vampires. To finish off my secondary equipment there's a Colt 1911 tucked into a shoulder holster with a couple of extra clips. The ammo is, of course, blessed silver. Nothing else is worth carrying in this line of work. I sometimes carry more ammo or a bigger gun but if I need that sort of firepower in this district then I'm probably screwed already. The sort of bad guys that need that much to put down would be a distinctly bad thing to have in the vicinity of a portal to Hell.

For my primary weapon I'm favouring a bastard sword put together with all the advantages modern technology can give it these days. No real reason for that beyond the fact that the size of the blade and grip goes well well with my physical dimensions. Immortals normally favour weapons from their era of birth but I'm practical enough to realise that a short sword won't really cut it these days when most people who still use swords use two handed versions. My gladius still makes a nice backup though. Some would probably wonder why I don't use a katana – they are widely seen as being the best swords, after all - but anyone daft enough to use a katana when they're a regular demon hunter deserves all they get. Katanas are nice weapons but they do _not _do well against armour and many demons have tough enough skin that it might as well be armour.

Anyone watching me get ready would probably think I was paranoid and they'd be right. Paranoia keeps you alive and they really are out to get me. Even discounting the normal head-hunters an Immortal faces, I have a lot of enemies. Most, thankfully, think I'm already dead with the way I jump from identity to identity but all it takes is for one old minion to spot me and all hell will break lose. I don't even want to contemplate the shitstorm that would be raised if Dracula's old mates came calling on the hellmouth. Nosferatu are not nice things to fight against at the best of times.

* * *

The worst thing about the hellmouth is probably the way it dulls your supernatural senses. Normally I feel a demon coming a mile off with the amount of time I've been practising magic but here on the hellmouth everything feels demonic and they're pretty much worthless. Even worse, it works that way for fellow Immortals too. That has its up-sides but I'd much rather get some warning a hunter was coming than be better concealed from them. In the past I've wondered if it affected a Slayer as badly but asking Buffy didn't help. It seems that the Slayer senses are one part of the package she didn't get much of. Shame because they're damn useful.

That dulling of my senses means that I'm reduced to stalking vampires to try and find their nests. Truly not a dignified way to go about things, but it's the best I can do under these circumstances. That ninjitsu training I had back in the sixteenth century comes in useful but the fact that most vampires are complete morons is much more helpful. Honestly, with the enhanced senses vampires have, it shouldn't be possible to stalk them like this, but there you are. They think that, because they're a little stronger and faster than normal people, they're invulnerable and they get sloppy.

The guy I'm following is a prime example of that. I've popped up and scared him off a couple of potential victims already tonight but he doesn't seem to realise that he's being followed. It is absolutely pathetic. I suppose the really intelligent ones are the ones who aren't stupid enough to get turned but what sort of self-respecting vampire would turn an idiot like this? Alucard would have someone's head for even suggesting he turn a specimen like this. Anyway after a few hours of him failing miserably to find a victim to feed on it looks like he's getting bored enough to head on home. Finally.

After a few more minutes following the moron vampire I find myself outside a bar. A bar! This is not my night. I wait across the street from the bar for a while, cursing my luck and this damned vampire, before I cross over and take a look to see what's going on. At that point I'm just about ready to give up and go home. A frigging demon bar. What did I do to deserve this? He'll be in there for hours and those places normally have sewer exits so I probably won't even be able to follow him to his lair and catch whatever group he's hanging around with. The temptation to just say screw it and drop a Dragon Slave on the place was strong.

And then I felt it, the distinct feeling of pressure that only comes when another Immortal is in the vicinity. Wonderful. I immediately slid my hand into my coat and rested it on the hilt of my sword. I really didn't need this right now but maybe I could work out some frustrations on some passing headhunter. Most of them can't do shit against me anyway. I'm too old and have too many heads to my name to fall to Mr. Random Hunter and even the ones with enough power to their name to have a chance against me don't have the skill normally. And then the ones that have the skill normally end up losing when I fight dirty. They never expect that for some reason. As if hunters are the only ones allowed to cheat!

A visual inspection of the surrounding area revealed nothing to me and the pressure didn't feel like it was coming from inside the bar – and thank God for that, hunters with demon lackeys are a _serious_ pain in the arse at the best of times – so I decided to go on a little patrol of the surrounding area after putting a little chameleon charm on myself along with a notice-me-not charm. Those would buy me enough time to escape if it was a gang. Gangs of hunters are always nasty. I have to pull the Batman act when a gang shows up and even then it's risky as all hell. Taking a whole mess of hunters down so you can take their heads one after the other before the quickening starts is not easy.

The quick patrol revealed nothing but I could still feel the pressure of an Immortal's presence and it was very close. The number of people who could hide from me like this was pretty damned low and the number of them who were both Immortal and still had their heads attached was even lower. Really, there was only one person it could.

"Amanda?" I said. "Is that you?"

I still kept my hand on the hilt of my sword. There were no guarantees that I was right and I didn't really trust the woman even if was her. Trusting a fellow Immortal is a quick way to get shortened by a head in my book and trusting a thief isn't much better. Both at the same time? Don't be daft.

A few moments later I heard a quiet rustling behind me and then the light sounds of a woman's footsteps. I swivelled around and there she was: Attractive as ever with short, dark hair, but with a distinctly haggard cast to her features. Suddenly, I had a very bad feeling. Amanda could find trouble – and probably something to steal causing that trouble – in an empty room but it would have to be something bad to make her look this worried.

"Abraham? What are you doing here?" she said, her eyes darting to and fro all the time, looking for danger. "That creepy guy with the fangs isn't here, is he?"

"I live here, Amanda," I said. "And Alucard is in Britain with my heir as far as I know."

"Your heir?"

"Family business," I replied. "I was drawing too much attention to stay there myself. Name's Alexander now, by the way."

"Right. Alexander."

"What's going on, Amanda? After my head?"

"God, no. I make a policy of not going after people who are older, more powerful, and more skilled than I am."

"Smart girl. Got a headhunter after you then?"

Please, oh please, let it just be a hunter. I've heard all about the messes she gets MacLeod mixed up in and I really don't need that sort of crap dumping on me.

"I wish," she said. Oh well, the quiet life was getting a little boring. A praying mantis demon or Hyena possessed student gang doesn't really rate compared to some of the stuff in my past after all. "I've got a whole gang of them after me."

Bugger.

"And you brought them to me. Thank you so very much, Amanda. It's _such_ a pleasure to know you," I drawled.

"Hey, it's not like I knew you'd be here. I thought I could just ditch them here and double back to LA and catch a flight to somewhere far, far away where they'd never find me," she snapped.

I just sighed, a deep, heart-felt sigh. I really wish I'd stuck to my teacher's policy of taking heads on sight when he ran into other Immortals sometimes, but no I had to get soft and decide to only kill them if they attacked me. And damn my weakness for attractive women. This one had definitely done enough to justify a challenge when she robbed my house but I just had to cave in.

"I'd be so lucky. They'll be all over me like flies on shit when they feel how strong my quickening is," I said. "And don't you _dare_ leave them to me."

Would I do that?" she asked, though she didn't bother with the mock innocent look she does so well. "I don't suppose you have somewhere I could stay? Strength in numbers and all that."

And suddenly I felt rather embarrassed. The last time we'd met I was living in a large mansion set in its own grounds in London, a flagrant display of staggering wealth if there's ever been one. Now I was living in a tip of a house with a pair of alcoholic foster parents who had only been dissuaded from taking a swing at me every time their delusions of adequacy were broken after I'd beaten them unconscious that one time. Beaten may be overstating it actually. It had only taken one punch each. Wimps.

"Ah, that's really not a good idea," I said, dismayed at the defensive tone that had suddenly appeared in my voice. "My current living conditions aren't up to my old standards."

"You've fallen on hard times? I find that hard to believe," she said, looking even less convinced than her words showed if that was possible.

"I've had legal problems," I said. I looked around the alley we were in. "This isn't really the place to discuss things. There's a bar I know of not too far from here that would be much more private."

"You don't look old enough to be served in a bar, Alexander."

I rolled my eyes at her. With a moment's concentration I put up an illusion that made me look ten years older. "Better?"

Amanda's jaw dropped. "Wha? How?"

"Magic, my dear," I said playfully. Oh but it is fun to surprise people like that. I'd almost forgotten how funny their reactions could be. "Come on, follow me," I said, turning serious. "Best to get somewhere public if you have a gang of hunters after you."

* * *

The bar I took Amanda to was a fairly small one tucked away in a corner of what passed for the town centre that was, as far as I could tell, about the only place in town for adults to spend their nights. Despite that, it was still far from packed. I suppose that people aren't quite as stupid as they seem. The bar had a fairly old-fashioned, traditional atmosphere, like the pubs I used to visit on occasion back in England when I lived there. I sent Amanda off to a table in the corner, facing towards the door, and ordered a pint of some random American beer for myself and a glass of wine for Amanda.

Unsurprisingly, the beer was awful. How could I forget the horrors of American beer so quickly?

"So what's the deal, Amanda?" I asked, grimacing from the less than adequate taste of the beer and pushing it away.

"I don't know that much about the people after me," she said. "I've never met any of them before and the only reason I can think of for them following me is so that I don't want anyone about them."

I sighed. "Wonderful. Are you sure you didn't steal anything from them?"

The mock-hurt look she shot me wasn't even vaguely convincing. She soon gave it up under my unflinching gaze. "These guys don't have enough between them to interest someone like me," she said. "They just ran into me at random and decided to kill me as far as I can tell."

"Ah. More victims of your uniquely charming personality then," I jibed before turning serious. "How many and how old are we talking here? I can't call in a lot of help, not like the old days."

"I've seen six but never all at once. They normally seem to go around in twos or threes and I don't think any of them are more than a century or two old."

I leaned back in my chair and thought about it for a moment. "This is going to be a problem," I said. "If we take out one group of them then they'll start going out as one large group and we probably wouldn't be able to take four at once if they were smart about things."

"So we need to take out a group of three then," replied Amanda. "Doesn't sound that bad if I have you on my team. Maybe you can use some of that magic of yours to get rid of them."

"Even with magic the rules about killing an Immortal stand. While the head's attached to the body, the Immortal fights on. I could disintegrate one of them I suppose but there'd be no quickening released and I wouldn't be good for much for a while afterwards."

Not strictly true but I didn't really want to go into the more, ah, exotic magics I know. The collateral damage tends to make them less than useful in this day and age anyway. They just draw too much attention.

Amanda shook her head. "Damn. Well, we'll just have to do it the hard way then."

"Can't you get MacLeod to help you? I'm not really big on the boy scout thing, you know, especially when I'm outnumbered like this."

"Ah, he's not very happy with me right now," she said with a pout. "I'm not sure he'd come all this way just to help me."

"And he doesn't know me from Adam so we're on our own. Wonderful," I said with a sigh. Times like this, getting pissed out of my mind begins to look real tempting. Six head-hunters in town and my only ally is a thief whose combat skills are dubious unless I blow my cover completely and beg the Slayer for help. And she hasn't had any real training to draw out the Slayer instincts when it comes to using a sword anyway. Wonderful.

"Don't you know any Immortals who could help us? You must have at least taught some at your age," she said.

I snorted. "Like I said, not big on the boy scout act. When I run into a new Immortal I give them the run down on what they are and tell them to go learn how to fight with a sword. It's what I got and it didn't hurt me any."

Well, there is one exception, but there's no way I'm pulling her into this mess. Her immortality isn't even active yet.

Now it was Amanda's turn to snort. "That's you. I doubt anything short of a nuclear bomb will get rid of you. Even then you'd probably find a way to survive, you and the cockroaches."

That drew a lazy grin from me. "Well you don't last as long as I have without learning a few tricks. You're not exactly short on survival instinct yourself."

"True," she acknowledged. "Now what's got you so hard-up you can't even put up an old friend for the night?"

"Friend?" I asked with a raised eyebrow. When she didn't rise to the bait – darnn it – I decided that I might as well tell her. "I did something stupid. First, I decided to start a new identity out young and went back to school. Second, I got challenged in broad daylight and ended up taking a head in full view of a few dozen students. The only reason I'm not rotting in prison right now is that I'm rich as sin and my lawyers make demons look friendly."

"So? You're out now, aren't you?"

"Yeah and what do you think they do with sixteen year old convicts? I'm stuck with foster parents here and I'm pretty much cut off from all my resources unless I want to draw attention that I can't deal with right now."

"I just can't imagine you without your money," drawled Amanda. "It just doesn't work for me. You were probably born rich."

"I have a good setup but I get too much attention from the law and it'll all fall apart, Amanda. You can only inherit from yourself so many times before it gets dangerous, you know that."

"I know. So there's no chance you can put me up?"

"Unless you want to play the naughty teenager sneaking into a boy's room at the dead of night, no."

"It might be worth it. A little embarrassment is worth keeping my head."

And so I ended up sleeping on the floor with my sword under my pillow while Amanda took the bed. How I ended up doing something so, yuck, chivalrous is beyond me. I must be getting soft in my old age. Either that or the discomfort was considerably less irritating than the prospect of having to listen to that woman's bitching about it the next day. Amanda's certainly not the suffer in silence type. I'd had a lot worse in the past anyway. The real problem was that Amanda was in the same room as me. I just didn't bloody trust her and there she was in my bed. Suffice to say, I didn't really sleep all that much or all that deeply that night.

* * *

The weight of my gladius in the sheathe I'd had sewn into the lining of my long coat was of great comfort to me as I walked to school the next morning. There's just something about knowing there's a bunch of lunatics in town who are definitely going to try and kill you to make you appreciate the benefits of carrying well-crafted weaponry. Of course there's the downside that the law would probably get more than a little pissed off if I was caught carrying such a weapon but that's just one of the strange things you get used to living in the modern world.

Being accompanied by someone who looks like Amanda got me some strange looks on the way to school. I know that I'm not exactly ugly or anything but being an eternal teenager has gotten me very used to the fact that people will look twice if they see me with a beautiful woman, unless I use an illusion to age my appearance to a more reasonable level. Of course, Amanda being Amanda, she had to ham it up and drive the gossipers to distraction. The woman is trouble personified.

Not that I didn't find the guy who walked into a lamppost when Amanda kissed me on the cheek and rubbed herself against my side amusing.

Soon enough we reached the school and Amanda was on her way to sneak around the town and see if she could find out where the head-hunters were hiding out. Strangely enough people are more likely to tell an attractive woman stuff than they are a guy like me. Go figure. Anyway, I made sure she had the mobile phone I'd given her and it was programmed with my number, and then she was gone leaving me to another joyous day of sitting around being taught things I've known since before this country even existed by teachers who blatantly couldn't give a damn. One thing's for sure: Next identity I take will not be of school age.

* * *

"He spent the night? In your room? In your bed?" I heard Jesse say as I walked into the library. Oh it gets better. Now he's off on one because of his crush on Buffy. Wonderful. As if the whole Hyena thing hadn't made him look like enough of an idiot for one lifetime already.

"Not **in** my bed, **by** my bed," retorted Buffy quickly, looking a little embarrassed.

"That is so romantic! Did you, uh . . . I mean, did he, uh . . . " said Willow, trailing off in embarrassment. Really, if it wasn't for that girl I probably wouldn't be so gung-ho about helping this little group. She just reminded me of my little sister and it's been so long since I lost her to that bastard of a patrician that I can't help but have a little soft spot for the girl that reminds me of her. Otherwise? I've done my time fighting the forces of evil, thank you very much.

Buffy smiled, "Perfect gentleman," and Willow returned that smile.

"Buffy, c'mon, wake up and smell the seduction. It's the oldest trick in the book," moaned Jesse.

"And here's me thinking the oldest trick in the book was getting the girl drunk," I said as I ghosted up behind Buffy, who promptly jumped out of her skin.

"Don't do that!" she said, aiming a not so light slap at my chest as she said it.

"Stop being so sloppy that I can sneak up on you and I won't," I said, totally serious, as I rubbed the slightly bruised spot where her slap had landed.

Buffy just growled at me. Ah, she'll get it eventually. Probably not until something nasty happens because she's not paying attention but she'll get it. Kids. I just don't understand them, not these days.

"Can we steer this riveting conversation back to the events that happened earlier in the evening?" said Giles, sounding vaguely irritated in that very proper English way of his. Buffy sat down and started to pay attention at least and sat back down at the table. "You left the Bronze and were set upon by three unusually virile vampires," he said, before placing an open book in front of her. "Did they look like this?"

"Yeah. What's with the uniforms?"

"It seems you encountered the Three. Warrior vampires, very proud and very strong," said Giles. I barely repressed a snort remembering what Alucard thought of demonic vampires and how easily he'd slaughtered them when they were stupid enough to show up around him.

gHow is it you always know this stuff?" asked Willow. "You always know what's going on. I never know what's going on."

"Well, you weren't here from midnight until six researching it," replied Giles.

"No, I was sleeping."

Giles turned to face Buffy once more as he spoke again, "Uh, o-obviously you're hurting the Master very much. He, he wouldn't send the, the Three for just anyone. We must step up our training with weapons."

"Swords?" I asked, hopefully.

"Not yet," said Giles, immediately. You'd think he was uncomfortable with the idea of me being near sharp, pointy objects around him or something. Just because I'd lopped that old witch's head off without a second thought and hadn't bothered to pretend to feel any guilt. Wuss. You'd think that a watcher would be made of sterner stuff than that.

"Buffy, you should stay at my house until these Three guys are history," said Jesse.

Huh?

"What?" asked a very confused looking Buffy.

"Ah-ah-ah, don't worry about Angel, Willow can run to your house and tell him to get out of town fast," followed up Jesse, looking altogether too happy with the idea.

"Angel and Buffy are, are not in any immediate jeopardy," said Giles. "Eventually the Master will send someone else, but in the mean time the Three, having failed, will offer their own lives in penance."

"Yeah, and, on that cheery note, I'll be off. I just stopped by to tell you guys that I'll be busy the next few days and probably won't be able to help you if anything happens," I said. "I'm sure you'll all be devastated at not having me here to carry you," I followed up, tongue firmly in cheek. And for my troubles I got another slap to the chest, which landed at exactly the same spot as the last, and which hurt like hell. Bloody Slayer doesn't know her own strength.

* * *

After spending a couple of hours gaining great amusement from watching Buffy smack Giles around the library in the guise of training and a few more hours in mind-numbingly tedious classes the school day was over and done with. To say that I didn't hang around once the final bell had rang would be the understatement of the decade – understatement of the century goes to my dear old friend John who said, "this is going to be bad," when we ran into Dracula after pissing him off badly – and honestly the only thing stopping me from teleporting out was the fact that it takes _way_ too much power for me to do if I want to do anything else the same day.

A quick phone call once I'd gotten far enough away from school later and I was meeting Amanda in a small greasy spoon café not far away from where I'd first ran into her this time around over a cup of tepid coffee.

"So, any success?" I asked.

"I have a lead to follow up on," she said. "But I didn't really want to get too close to them on my own."

I nodded my head. It was understandable. "So what is it?"

"Supposedly there have been some men who look like the ones that've been following me hanging around one of the buildings in the warehouse district of town," she said. "Sounds worth a look to me."

I grimaced. "The warehouse district of this town is not a good place to be after dark," I said, thinking of the vampires that hung out there. "Best to go now and get it out of the way and get back before dark if we can."

Amanda raised an eyebrow at that. "It's not like you to be so nervous over facing the local crooks, Alexander," she said.

"There's more to it than that, Amanda," I replied. "Just trust my judgement and go for the decapitation if we're attacked."

She looked puzzled but after a moment she nodded.

* * *

By the time we got to the warehouse district and had eyeballed the right building, we were running out of sunlight and it made me distinctly twitchy. It was a known fact that some of the local vampire gangs made their nests in this area of town and I didn't fancy the prospect of being on their menu tonight if I could help it. While being drained by a vampire wasn't a fatal experience for one of my kind, it still wasn't exactly pleasant and dealing with a vampire hopped up on Immortal blood can be bloody dangerous if they realise they've been enhanced. You see, it's not as obvious as it is with Slayer blood. With Slayer blood they get way faster and stronger and they know that happens. With Immortal blood they just heal ridiculously fast. It's like combining their vampiric healing with whatever the Immortal they drained had. God only knows what they could heal from with the blood from an Immortal as old as me in their veins.

I was beginning to wonder how I was going to explain vampires and demons to Amanda without sounding like a complete lunatic. She might not be as old or have as many heads to her name as I do, but she's still strong enough for it to be a real problem if a vampire got her blood in them. I also imagine that the bitching out I would get for not warning her would be the stuff of legends. I had to weight it up: potential wasting of time being called a lunatic Vs. potential bitching. In the end I chose the second. Call me cold-blooded but we couldn't afford to waste time and there was very little chance one of the vampires would actually do anything truly fatal to her.

"This is the one," she said, pointing at the warehouse at the other end of the wide road we were walking along and drawing me out of my thoughts.

"Right," I said, while eyeing up the surrounding buildings. We needed one that we'd be able to observe the target from but it couldn't be too high or I'd never be able to reach the roof even with my magic reinforcing my jump. Soon enough I'd found one and I promptly yanked Amanda into the accompanying alley. "Don't scream," I said, before scooping her up into my arms and making a rather prodigious leap up onto the warehouse's roof.

"I don't know why I'm surprised by anything you do anymore," she said coolly while brushing her clothing back into order. Not that I could see anything wrong with it as it was.

I just shrugged my shoulders and settled down onto my belly to watch the target location. A few moments later Amanda settled down next to me on crossed legs.

"So any plans?" she asked.

"Sit and wait," I said. "Not much else we can do and we should be safe up here from any roaming nasties."

"I'd have thought so right up to the point where you _jumped onto the roof_!" she said, her voice growing shrill and rather unpleasant by the time she finished speaking.

"Calm yourself," I said. "It's no worse than meeting people who can survive being disembowelled surely?"

"I got used to that! That was normal! This? This is anything but!"

"Deep breaths, Amanda. Remember that we're supposed to be trying to avoid being noticed here."

"You should have thought of that before you jumped twenty feet in the air carrying me like it was nothing!"

I sighed. "It was just a little bit of magic, Amanda. A temporary physical boost. Nothing special."

"Nothing special!" she said before dissolving into muttering about something or other. It was quite irritating really.

* * *

Roughly an hour of sitting on the roof and my coming progressively closer to shortening Amanda by a head just to get the woman to shut her mouth later there was finally some signs of movement from the warehouse we were watching. Not much at first, just some shadows moving near the back entrance, but they soon resolved into two seedy looking men leaving the building. The long coats were a dead give-away. No-one wears that sort of thing in California at that time of year unless they're either vampires (who simply don't care) or hiding weapons. I was betting on the weapons but either way they were going to die.

"Keep an eye on the building. Any more signs of movement and you call my phone immediately," I ordered, slipping into command mode instinctively, keeping an eye on the two hunters as they moved away from the warehouse. "And hide your quickening as best you can."

I took a moment to flick my phone over to vibrate and tucked it into my trouser pocket before leaping to the next roof to get behind the hunters. I took a deep breath after I landed on the roof to steady my nerves and bled my humanity away into the box I kept it when I was going into battle. Guilt, empathy, mercy – the capacity to feel such soft emotions was bled away and replaced by someone who was as cold as ice. And then I drew my Colt 1911 with my left arm and jumped down to the ground behind the two hunters with barely a sound upon impact.

I shot the shorter of the two hunters through the back of his neck before he knew anything was wrong and he went down twitching and spasming as his spinal cord was severed. That would take some time to heal. The second reacted immediately, throwing himself to the side and twisting to face me. I winged him with two quick shots before drawing my sword with my right arm and entering melee combat range.

I immediately had to parry an overhead strike that would have cleaved my head in two before lashing out with a rigid hand, striking the throat of the hunter. As he staggered back, gagging, I swung my gladius around in a decapitating strike that he barely managed to knock aside enough to cut into his left arm instead of his throat – leaving it hanging uselessly at his side – before slamming a side kick into his chest knocking him off his feet and down onto his back.

Before I could advance forwards and shorten the fool by a head I instinctively ducked away and to the side, narrowly avoiding the attack that would have cut my sword arm clean off. Before I could react properly the shorter hunter was on me with a rapid series of sword strikes that prevented me from mounting any organised offence and kept me backing off. He had some moderate skill and it was enough for him to keep me on the defensive and prevent me from taking the few seconds to line up a good shot with my gun arm and put him on his arse.

As I continued to defend I saw a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye and instinctively twisted and altered the angle of my retreat to face that movement as well. Seeing the other hunter back on his feet and coming at me I reflexively raised my gun arm and put a bullet between his eyes. He dropped to the ground like a puppet that'd had its strings cut. He won't be getting up from that any time soon. Bullets in the brain take _ages_ to heal unless you've got an extremely powerful quickening.

Twisting again to fully face the still standing hunter, I parried aside a particularly vicious lunge at my chest and launched a one-two slicing attack at his arms that was parried both sides but allowed me time to solidify my stance and get time to gather my thoughts and back into the fight proper. With that second's grace taken I launched forward into a rapid series of probing strikes to test the hunter's defences. He manages to keep everything attached but he's obviously at the limits of his skill just dealing with these probing attacks.

He lunged forward in a desperate attempt to regain control of the bout but I deftly parried his strikes keeping my face impassive all the while. The look of slowly rising panic in his eyes was all I needed to see to get me to go on a full offensive, striking with a speed and precision that this comparatively young Immortal cannot match and I soon had him backed against the alley wall, desperately fending off the attacks that were coming far too quickly for him to mount any kind of real offensive.

The look of slowly rising panic was replaced by absolute terror as I pressed the advantage and it didn't take long for the fool to do something stupid. He lunged forward in a vain attempt to skewer me but I disarmed him with a flick of my wrist and then brought my sword around in an arc and lopped his head off before he could do much more than look terrified. Before the quickening was released I strolled over to the desperately twitching body of the other hunter and shortened him by a head too. Two for the price of one – a good day's hunting, really.

A moment later the world exploded into pain and the alleyway started to fall apart around me as the first quickening was transferred. It's all I can do not to scream as I feel the new power forcibly enter my system and when the second quickening joins the first I couldn't help myself as I was forcibly lifted into the air and thrown around the alleyway like a rag-doll caught in a tornado. There really is nothing in the world like receiving a quickening, nothing you can compare it to. The feeling of pain and violation as someone else's memories and power is forced into you . . . it isn't pleasant.

It ended soon enough – though it felt like it took hours – and I dropped to the ground gasping for air and feeling every minute of my two thousand plus years. I'll never be able to understand why people go looking for this, how they can enjoy it. It just leaves me feeling tired and achy and altogether too much like the old man I really am. Head-hunters really are a perverse breed. After a few seconds I feel the strength return to my limbs and lever myself back onto my feet. Already hearing people moving towards me in the distance, I use my magic to wrap the shadows around me and retreat to safety.

* * *

"Don't you care at all about avoiding police attention?" asked an exasperated Amanda as we beat our retreat from the warehouse district.

"Not really."

"WHAT? Do you want to go back to prison?"

"This is Sunnydale, Amanda. Nothing short of detonating a thermonuclear device will attract any attention I can't deal with."

"I don't get it."

"You don't want to either. Just take my advice and get out of this town as soon as this mess is finished and _don't come back_. Ever."

* * *

With two of the six hunters taken out without too much difficulty I was beginning to feel optimistic about things as I headed into school the next day. Boy was that ever a bad idea. I should have remembered that feeling optimistic is like planting a cosmic kick-me sign on my back.

"Angel's a vampire?" I heard Willow ask as I ran into the group outside the front of the school.

Oh yeah, God hates me. It's the only explanation.

"I can't believe this is happening. One minute we were kissing, and the next minute . . . " said Buffy. "Can a vampire ever be a good person? Couldn't it happen?"

I had to restrain my laughter. A vampire a good person? That's a good one! What's next? God and Lucifer getting together for a tea party?

"A vampire isn't a person at all," Giles, before clearing his throat. "It may have the movements, the, the memories, even the personality of the person that it took over, but i-it's still a demon at the core, there is no halfway."

"So that'd be a no, huh?" said Willow.

It was at this point that I made the connection. Vampire. Angel. Angelus. This was _not_ good. I'd seen the aftermath of that creature's idea of fun back in my Van Helsing days and the only reason I hadn't hunted him and his lackeys to the ends of the Earth was because Dracula was even worse and much more powerful.

"Well, then what was he doing? Why was he good to me? Was it all some part of the Master's plan? It doesn't make sense!" said Buffy, sitting down on a nearby bench with Willow.

"Who knows?" I said. "It's not human and you can't expect it to think like one. Angelus, and that's who I this is, was always one for playing with his food too."

"Angelus? Are you sure?" asked Giles.

"Who else could it be? He's a male vampire calling himself Angel and he's hanging around in the same town as the Master's group. It has to be him," I said.

"Bad, huh?" asked Jesse.

"He hasn't got a scrap of humanity in him if he is Angelus. The only good point is that he was never much of a fighter really and Buffy should be able to take him out without too much risk."

"If he's such a bad fighter then why do you look so worried?" asked Willow.

"Because he's an evil son-of-a-bitch even compared to other vampires. He might not be able to beat Buffy in a fight but he'd work his way through everyone she cares about and leave their bodies for her to find to wear her down."

"Oh," said Willow, looking utterly disgusted.

"He's a vampire, you're the Slayer. I think it's obvious what you have to do here," said Jesse, looking a little green around the gills himself.

"Uh, it is a Slayer's duty . . . " said Giles.

I tuned them out at that point. Buffy's angsting over what to do held absolutely zero interest for me. If she killed him, great. If she didn't, I'd deal with the creature. Easy. He was just another demonic sewer rat anyway even if he was a particularly bloodthirsty and sadistic one. No threat to me unless I did something deeply stupid. I was much more worried about the four pissed off head-hunters that would be after me. With Angelus around stirring up trouble, that situation looked a whole lot grimmer. They'd have to be eliminated immediately before Angelus could cause too much distraction.

I really should have stayed in England.

* * *

"So what's the plan now?" asked Amanda when we met up after school. "The hunters were still operating out of the same warehouse so we still have that at least."

"They'll be more cautious now," I said, thinking out loud. "If we had more numbers I'd say we storm the warehouse but with just the two of us . . . I'm not so sure."

"Don't you have anything that could even the odds?" she said, grimacing as she took a sip of the absolutely terrible coffee this place served.

"Not really. A few handguns and ammunition is about it. I wasn't expecting to need anything more than that here," I said. "I don't exactly keep heavy weapons and explosives at hand as a matter of course and certainly not when I'm stuck living with other people."

"Shame. So what are we going to do? They're going to be waiting for us now, you know."

I pondered it for a moment. We weren't going to be able to jump any more of their patrols, that much was for certain, but the warehouse was their territory and openly attacking it was asking for trouble. But . . . we could burn them out and take them when we got them in open combat.

"I have an idea," I said, with a predatory grin growing on my face. "Burn them out of the warehouse and then attack them in open combat. Two on one odds aren't great but we're older and stronger than they are so it should balance out mostly. They can't be all that skilled if they hunt in packs."

"Two on one odds _suck_ when they're other Immortals, Alexander. When we take one's head the other can get us when we're receiving the quickening."

"I know. That's why there's going to be two of us there. That way there'll only be one of us down with a quickening at a time."

"I still don't like it," she said, grimacing. "That still leaves one person to hold off all the hunters left standing till the other's back on their feet."

I shrugged my shoulders. "Not much we can do about that. We could try luring them into a trap but that'll take time to set up and the longer this goes on the more chance of even more head-hunters showing up."

Amanda shuddered. "I think we've got quite enough of them on our plate for now thank you very much. You have a plan, I assume?"

"Torch the warehouse,hoot the bastards as they leave, take as many heads as we can before they regroup, and then deal with whatever is left over."

"Efficient and bloodthirsty. Very you, I think."

"Thanks."

* * *

"So what now?" asked Amanda, eyeing the surroundings as we stood near the warehouse that been doubling as a base for the hunters. She looked a little nervous to be hanging around in front of a warehouse with a gun in one hand and a sword in another.

"Now I torch the place," I said, beginning to focus my power for the large-scale attack that would be necessary.

"How?"

"Magic."

"Oh."

I felt the power beginning to rush into me as I channelled from almost every source I'd ever tapped in the past. This was the biggest spell I'd attempted in nearly a hundred years and the amount of power I was channelling honestly took my breath away. I'd forgotten how the world seems to come alive around you when you really begin to tap into the more powerful magical forces in the world and the way the power seems to rush through you. It's quite addictive really.

Soon enough the power had built up enough for me to call on the elemental force of fire on the scale needed. Fire is a particular talent of mine. If it had been ice or earth or one of the other elements then it would have taken a lot longer. I raised my hands into the air and pointed them at the roof of the warehouse I was targeting. "Ignite!" I cried out and flames began to dance across the roof of the warehouse. "Ignite!" I cried again and flames to appear across the walls. "Ignite!" I cried once more and the flames grew in both size and intensity. "IGNITE!" I cried a final time and the flames became a towering inferno.

Not a good day really. Four applications of my magic to set one building alight. I was really out of practice. It's a hell of a lot harder to do something so large-scale than it is to chuck a relatively small fireball around. Then again, judging from the look on Amanda's face, it was impressive enough as it was.

"Bloody hell," she said breathlessly. "I have _got_ to learn how to do that!"

I just shook my head and mentally prepared myself for battle, once again draining off the softer emotions so that they wouldn't get in the way of what had to be done. Focussing on the heavy weight of the Colt 1911 in my hand, I waited for the hunters to flee the building into the little ambush we had set up. It didn't take long. I guess there's just something about being in a burning building that makes you throw caution to the wind. I know I wouldn't hang around in one after experiencing what it was like to burn to death – or as close to it as someone like me can come while the head's still attached to the body.

As the fourth hunter spilled out, I opened fire along with Amanda. Most of her shots missed completely but I landed five out of the seven shots I got from my clip and using jacketed hollow points that's a lot of damage inflicted. With that done I tossed my gun aside and lifted my bastard sword into a two-handed grip and went into melee combat with Amanda. With two of the hunters down healing and the other two healing this was the best chance we were going to get.

The one I attacked never really stood a chance to be honest. With his leg bleeding from an awful thigh wound and his lungs full of smoke, his mobility was limited as all hell and I had him completely at my mercy. He tried hard, I'll give him that, but he was shortened by a head in short order and I was soon taking a less than spectacular quickening. When I recovered from the quickening – only taking a moment to steady my nerves – I saw Amanda desperately fending off two singed looking thuggish types while another hunter – who looked a bit more reputable – twitched on the ground looking like his healing would have him moving again soon.

My decision was clear. If Amanda couldn't handle a couple of grunts, well, that was just too bad. With the easy takings out of the game then it'd be down to two on two and we could win that easily. Worst case, Amanda lost her head and I had to deal with a couple of grunts. Considering they were cheats of the worst kind I could just fry 'em with a fireball if it got too bad. And with that in mind, I took my second quickening of the night. Not bad going – four quickenings in two days, it's the most I've ever had so close together. This one was a pretty good one too for someone who couldn't have been more than three or four hundred years old.

Looking up from my quickening I saw Amanda in an awful position: her sword arm battered to the side and her opponent bringing his sword around for the decapitating strike. Instinctually, I hefted my bastard sword and hurled it through the guy's back like a spear. The scream of pain and frustration was something worthy of legend though it was cut short after a few seconds when Amanda took his head. I drew my backup weapon – my trusty old gladius – and immediately lunged to defend Amanda from the attack of the last hunter.

We went back and forth for a couple of minutes, mostly with me parrying his attacks as I couldn't get in close enough with my much shorter weapon against his over-sized longsword. Soon enough Amanda lopped the fool's head off from behind for her second quickening of the day and it was done.

* * *

After the battle was done we quickly vacated the area and headed to the nearby ice cream parlour to recuperate from the battle. Or, more correctly, we went there because Amanda needed a sugar infusion to recover from coming within three inches of losing her head and taking two quickenings in quick succession.

"I can't believe you just left me to fight those two on my own like that!" she said, eventually, waving her spoon at me in a vaguely threatening manner.

"It worked out didn't it? We've both got our heads attached still and the hunters are dealt with. It's all good," I said, with a negligent shrug of my shoulders.

"I was about five seconds from being dead. It is not all good," said Amanda, looking more than a little frazzled with how close she'd been to death.

"Hey, I saved your neck in the end, didn't I?"

"I suppose so but you could have done it a little quicker," she grumbled.

"Ah quit your complaining. Six enemies dead and not a scratch on us. It's a good day."

A lull in the conversation followed which I eventually broke.

"No offence, Amanda, but I don't want to see you again anytime soon if this is what your visits are going to be like."

"You're not exactly my first choice for a visit, either, Alexander. I don't even know your real name."

"Does it really matter? I haven't gone by that name in over two thousand years."

"I suppose not."

* * *

Finding out that for some reason Buffy had spared Angelus did not make my night. Finding out that he had been cursed with a human soul just amused me. A fitting punishment for the demon but a truly lousy way for someone to spend their eternity in the afterlife. I personally would brutally slaughter whoever was responsible if my body was turned and they shoved my soul back into the body, not that it's a concern for one of my kind – our bodies reject vampirism entirely. You have to be dying a lingering death for vampirism to take hold, either kind of vampirism, and that just doesn't happen to an Immortal. Best thing about being one of us really if you run into that sort of creature regularly.

So that was why I was out searching for the vampire's lair. If we were going to leave him alive then I was damn well going to make sure that he knew that he was on a damn tight leash. Any signs of going back to his demonic ways and I'd burn the fucker down on the spot without a second thought. It didn't take that long to find. He had no magical protections up to prevent scrying spells of any kind and as such a simple tracking spell found him and I just followed it to his door.

I could have done the polite thing and knocked but really I don't give walking corpses that sort of consideration so I blew the door off its hinges with an exploding hex and just walked on in.

"What the hell?" said the corpse before I knocked him onto his arse with a kick to the chest.

"Hello, Angelus," I said. "Remember me?"

"Never seen you before in my life," he replied, rubbing at his eyes, probably because of the light show my little spell had given off.

"Oh you have. You just don't recognise me," I said. "Perhaps this looks more familiar?"

And then I used a glamour to assume the aged appearance I'd had the one time our paths had crossed in London back in the nineteenth century. His hiss of surprise said it all.

"Van Helsing," he said. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"I'm giving you a warning. The Slayer might have a head almost as soft as her heart but I'm not so easily swayed. Give me any reason to think you're going back to your old ways and I'll kill you. Slowly."

"Right," he said. "That's fair, I suppose. Why are you so pissed at me anyway? I don't remember ever going against your crowd."

"If you had, you'd have been filling an ashtray long ago. Remember the church? London, 1860, you slaughtered them like animals and desecrated the place for kicks while you were there. I was the person called in after you were finished, the monster expert. I had to put the ones you left alive out of their misery."

"If they called you in why didn't you come after me?"

"I had bigger fish to fry. As bad as you were there was a hell of a lot worse I had to deal with before I could after you and by the time I was ready you'd disappeared presumed dusted. Someone must have been hiding you because there's no way you could have blocked my scrying." I shook my head. "That isn't important. Just know that I'm going to be watching you very closely, vampire, and any excuse to dispose of you will be taken. I'm not the Slayer and I couldn't give a shit about your soul. The only good vampire is a dead vampire."

"So why am I still in one piece?"

"Killing you now would be more trouble than it's worth. I have at least another two years living here in front of me and if I kill you Buffy will become troublesome. I can deal with that but I don't really want to."

"So I survive because you're too lazy to deal with the consequences of killing me."

"I know you, Angelus. You're too damn cowardly to stick around here and cause trouble now you know who I am. You'll either fight on our side or you'll quietly leave and take the problem somewhere else. It works for me. I can always hunt you down later if I need to."

He looked vaguely offended that I'd called him a coward but he proved me right when he didn't argue it. Pathetic. He'd better show more spine when it came to fighting the vampires or I'd have to get creative in motivating him.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three: Prophecy Girl**

School really was about the most boring thing on the face of the Earth, I decided, as I walked home after one particularly awful day. If it wasn't bad enough that I had to suffer the indignity of being a high-school student, I had to be the one with the reputation that caused all the local morons to try it on with me. It wasn't as if I was in any danger - I'm Immortal! - but it's irritating. Dealing with punk kids who think they're hot shit because they carry knifes is _not_ my idea of a good time. They have knifes, I have a short sword. It's just unutterably stupid. But that's Sunnydale for you.

The latest moron to try me had been that short-arse psycho O'Toole. How he hadn't been locked in a cell somewhere by then is beyond me. The guy generally spent his spare time breaking and entering, maiming people who got on his wrong side (generally by breathing funny or something similar), and just generally causing mayhem. How could the police not have enough evidence to put him away for something approximating forever? Well, he'd started on me, and I'd had to take him into the nearest alley and give him a thrashing just on general principles. I might not remember my mother all that well - thousands of years and hundreds of quickenings will do that - but I wasn't having with some young punk calling her those names.

Well, he'd think twice before crossing me again when he got out of hospital.

Anyway, it was a clear night as far as I could remember. Nothing on the schedule, no demons in the internet, no giant preying mantis demons hanging around, no little boys warping the fabric of reality, no invisible teenagers with murderous tendancies, and most of all no god-damned puppets wandering around with butcher's knives. That last one had just been freaky. Puppets are not meant to be able to talk back to you. Period. Then again he hadn't said much to me after I singed him with a lightning bolt. His own fault, shouldn't have surprised me. First clear night I'd had in a long time. With a nod to myself, I resolved to phone home and see how things were going back in LA.

* * *

"Smith residence," said the familiar voice on the other end of the phone.

"Hello, Peter," I said. "It's Xander."

"Boss! How are you?" he asked, pausing before continuing in a rather chiding tone of voice. "We haven't heard from you in months."

"Thing have been . . . hectic," I replied, a little defensively. "It turns out that chucking molotov cocktails into vampire lairs just stirs up more trouble than it's worth. And there's the usual hellmouth nonsense."

"I'm not the one you need to explain yourself to," said Peter dryly and I felt my stomach drop. "Faith has not been happy with your lack of contact."

"I sent letters!"

"Not quite what I'm talking about," he said. "Is it really so difficult to pick up the telephone and make a call?"

"You know I don't like using the phone," I said. "And stuck here with some inbred alcoholic twits as my foster-parents? Yeah, it is kinda difficult to get privacy."

"You seem to have managed it today," said Peter.

"I, uh, may have drugged them insensate," I said. Then I frowned, "thinking about it - not such a great idea with the amount they drink. I do hope that I haven't poisoned them."

"Going soft, boss?"

"It would get messy," I said. "Another murder trial is the last thing I need right now. I'd be obliged to break out and that's never something to be done lightly."

"Should have guessed," he said with a laugh. "You know you could always get a computer and use e-mail. That would work."

"No it would not," I said quickly. "You know what I think of those damned machines."

"You're just an old technophobe," said Peter. "You'll have to get used to using them eventually, you know, unless you intend to lose your head?"

"Bite your tongue, man!" I said. "My head's staying firmly attached and firmly away from computers if I can help it."

I could almost see Peter shaking his head at me on the other end of the phoneline. I'd known the man a long time - almost as long as he'd been alive - and I could easily predict his mannerisms. Then the conversation turned serious. "Well, you have to do something, Xander. You can't just disappear for months on end, not when you have Faith to take into account."

Yeah, I knew him well, and he knew me well. Made it way too easy to guilt trip me. It was even worse when he was right. "I know, Peter. I know, okay? I'm just no good at this stuff."

"You're not so terrible," said Peter, "as long as you have someone to remind you when you're doing something stupid."

"Thanks for the overwhelming vote of confidence," I grumbled.

"Well, someone has to keep you in check," said Peter. "And now I really think you should speak to Faith. Oh, and do talk to her about her behaviour at school. She might actually listen to you."

"Yeah, put her on," I said.

The line fell silent for several moment before I heard the sound of muffled conversation and then a voice on the line. "Hey, pop," said Faith.

"Hey, Faith," I said. "How's things?"

"Uh, pretty good," she said. "Been pretty quiet without you around though. When you coming back?"

"I'd be in a car and heading back right now if I could, Faith," I said with a heartfelt sigh. "I _hate_ this town and I miss you. But I can't. The law has me by the balls here, Faith. If I disappear, they'll come looking. If I fake my death, they'll still come looking when the body disappears. We'd have to disappear and I am _not _taking you on the run."

"But . . . "

"No, Faith," I said sternly. "You deserve better than that. Couple more years and I'll be free to come back home. It really isn't that long. Once you get to my age, you'll realise that."

"Yeah, like any normal person could ever last as long as you," said Faith sulkily.

"It's still a long life anyway," I said. "Even if you only manage the mortal life of about seventy, eighty years or so. A couple of years waiting isn't all that much and it's not like I'm totally gone. And Peter's still there. Anyway, have you been keeping up with your sword practice?"

"Yeah," said Faith. "Don't see much point in it though. What do I need to know how to use a sword for?"

"You have exceptional talent, Faith," I said. "It would be a terrible shame to waste that, even in a world where few see the utility of such weapons."

"You're weird, pop," said Faith. "Most parents worry about how their kids are doing in school, not how good they are at fighting with a sword, you know?"

"True enough," I said. "But normal people are boring. Anyway, how are you doing in school?"

"Uh . . . "

"Faith," I said warningly. "You'd best not be goofing off in class again. You need that education."

"Look, I don't start the trouble," she said. I could almost see the defiant expression on her face as she spoke. "I just finish it."

"I can appreciate that," I said. "But do try to avoid fighting wherever you can. I didn't teach you how to defend yourself so you could beat up schoolboy idiots."

I almost winced at the hypocrisy of that as I said it. Do as I say and not as I do, indeed. Perhaps it was time to improve my own behaviour.

"Pop!"

"Faith, I don't mind you defending yourself," I said. "But you have to be smart about it. Don't let them get your blood up; you get yourself into enough trouble that way."

"Sure, pop," said Faith sarcastically. "I'll make sure to only have idiots start fights with me away from school."

"Well, that would be a start," I said. "But why are people picking fights with you anyway? I don't remember you having that much trouble before."

"Mostly just stupid cheerleader types getting jealous cause their boys keep looking at me," said Faith. "Like I'm interested in those idiots."

Hmm. From nought to killing rage in the time she took to finish a sentence. That was a new one for me. The idea of teenage boys pawing at little Faith was more than a little repulsive to me.

"Hmm," I said, forcing my desire to head back to LA and cut these boys' penises off. "I suggest adding bromide to the school's water supply."

"Wha?"

"It doesn't really matter," I said. "Now you be careful. None of those boys are good enough for you. End of story. Remember that."

"POP!"

"Well, it's true," I said. "Teenage boys are only after one thing and I highly recommend using your knees to deal with them if they try that with you. That'll stop 'em in their tracks right quick."

"I can look after myself, pop," said Faith. "They won't be getting nothing from me that I don't want to give."

I'm not quite sure how long I spent sputtering after she said that, but it was a fair while. Damn children.

"Still alive over there?" asked Faith a few moments later as I regained my equilibrium.

"Yes," I grouched. "No thanks to you, you cheeky little brat."

The conversation wondered across many topics from that point. I was in no rush to end the conversation and neither was Faith as far as I could tell. It really was good to be able to have real contact with her again. Eventually, though, the conversation was cut short when the ground began to shake underneath my feet.

"I'll have to go now, Faith," I said. "We appear to be having an earthquake."

"WHAT!?"

"Rather inconsiderate really," I said. "Anyway, I'll be sure to get in touch a little more regularly from now on."

The quake proved to be a rather unimpressive one. The house sustained no structural damage whatsoever, though I did have to pull some acrobatics to stop things falling on my comatose guardians' heads. Why I bothered to do that shall forever be a mystery to me because they really aren't worth the effort.

* * *

The next day dawned bright and altogether too early for the tastes of my foster parents considering the moaning that came from their room when the sunlight woke them. Perhaps I had been a little over-enthusiastic with my application of the drugs I'd used. Hmm. Nah. They deserved it, those work-shy, alcoholic parasites. I'll never be able to understand why modern society allows that sort to leach off them. It would never have been permitted in my day. They'd have been set to work in the field whether they liked it or not and they wouldn't have liked the consequences if they'd tried to shirk that duty.

It wasn't till I reached the school that I realised that perhaps the quake had been a little more impressive than I'd initially given it credit for. The library was in quite a state indeed and didn't look to be too far from actual structural damage.

"Well now," I said. "Did you get gypped on the construction or what, G-man? Even my welfare bum guardians' house didn't fall apart like this."

"Oh very funny," said a harassed-looking Giles. "Are you going to help me, or are you just here to have fun at my expense."

"Well . . . " I said, before sobering up at seeing Giles's expression. "What? What's with the serious face? It's just a bloody earthquake; not like you have to pay for the repairs or anything."

"Don't be stupid," snapped Giles. "I couldn't care less about this bloody place. It's Buffy I'm worried about."

And that got me serious right quick. "What's going on?" I asked. "Has she been injured? Come on, man, out with it!"

"Morning!" said a rather cheerful sounding female voice, a voice that I immediately turned on my heel to face. It was Buffy. Huh?

"Wow. The damage looks fairly structural," said Buffy. "Are we safe in here?"

"Buffy!" said Giles, looking like he'd just seen a ghost. I was just as baffled.

"What?" asked Buffy, patting at her face. "Do I have something on my face?"

"No! Uh, and, and yes, we're, we're safe," said Giles before waving in the general direction of the stacks. "Uh, but probably best not to go up there".

"How're you doin' there, Giles?" asked Buffy. "Get much sleep last night?"

"Um . . . I-I-I've been working," stammered Giles.

"Me, too," said Buffy. "I went hunting last night, and it is awfully sweet of you to ask. It's getting hairy out there, Giles. I killed three vampires last night, and one of them was practically on school grounds."

"Their numbers are increasing," noted Giles, still not looking quite with it.

"Three vampires isn't that bad really," I interjected. "Bet you handled them well enough."

"That's so not the point," said Buffy. "Three's more than normal and I want to know why. Last night I got surprised. I don't want that to happen again. And what about you, Xander? Run into any vampires."

"A few," I said with a shrug. "Not much that different from normal where I go hunting."

"Hmm," said Giles, his voice and body language showing little other than distraction.

"Giles, care?" asked Buffy. "I'm putting my life on the line battling the undead. Look, I broke a nail, okay? I'm wearing a press-on. The least you could do is exhibit some casual interest. You could go, 'hmm'."

"Hmm?" asked Giles, still distracted. "Oh, sorry. Um, yes, I'm very glad that you're alright. Uh, I-I need to verify, um . . . I just can't really talk right now."

"Fine. That's okay," said Buffy. "I can't put it off any longer. I have to meet my terrible fate."

"What?!" barked Giles.

"Biology."

And then she grabbed me by my arm and dragged me off to Biology class. To be frank, I was quite baffled. What was that all about? I wasn't quite sure who to curse, Americans or Watchers - they're both bizarre breeds.

* * *

After class was over, I made tracks immediately, and headed to the library. Bugger classes, I wanted to know what was going on. What could they do anyway? Give me detention? Expel me? Feel my fear. I would've been quite happy to never sully myself ever again by associating with the wretched hive of scum and villainy known as Sunnydale High. But I'd be so lucky. American authorities are not quick to let you go once you've gotten yourself caught up in their infernal systems.

"So, Giles," I said as I set foot into his office. "What was that little display earlier all about?"

Giles started slightly as I set foot into his office and gave me quite the fearsome little glare - I do sometimes wonder if there's more to this Watcher than the stuffy self he generally shows to the world - before he said, "I truly doubt that you can help me with this problem, Xander."

"Oh really?" I asked, sitting in a chair opposite his desk, not allowing my irritation at his dismissive tone of voice show. "Why don't you try me?"

"Well, can you speak Latin?" he asked.

"Like a native," I said, in Latin, allowing my native accent to show.

Giles looked slightly baffled for a moment before it clicked. "How on Earth . . . Actually, I don't care," said Giles before shoving a dozen books into my arms. "Look for references to the rise of the Master and the death of the Slayer. And be quick about it."

I raised an eyebrow at that. "You know, it wouldn't hurt to actually tell me what's going on," I said. "Really, it wouldn't. I'm not exactly going to go announce it on CNN, you know."

And there's that glare again. "I found a prophecy in the Pergamum Codex," he bit out. "If it is correct, then Buffy is going to die and the Master will rise. I am attempting to verify the prophecy."

I grimaced and got to work. It'll forever be a puzzle to me why people don't convert these old books to something a little more modern. I mean, it's been how many centuries since they invented the printing press? Even Methos, a legendary Immortal who was supposedly pushing on for five thousand years old, would adapt quicker than some of these people. Some of these books had been written centuries after Gutenberg, and they were still hand-written.

Hours passed and very little of note was accomplished. The books Giles sent my way were all very vague and full of the sort of meaningless double-talk that seers had specialised in since Adam was a lad. It was all very dull and very pointless. If Buffy was going to be in trouble, then they'd be better off finding the source of that trouble and dropping a few pounds of napalm on its head than sticking with this nonsense. And I said as much.

Giles looked at me as if I was the biggest bastard on the face of the Earth. "For God's sake, man," he said, "Buffy's going to _die_ and you can't even take it seriously?"

I shrugged. "Everyone dies eventually," I said. "But prophecy's a load of bollocks. Buffy's beaten dangerous vampires before and I'm not going to play headless chicken because she's going to have to take on another one."

"The Master is more than a bloody vampire," snarled Giles. "He's the oldest on record and he's killed more Slayers than you've had hot dinners, so forgive me for being just a _little_ concerned."

"Since when did Watchers get all maudlin over their Slayers getting sliced and diced?" I asked, genuinely curious. "That's a new one on me."

"What the bloody fuck would you know, you insolent brat?"

"I've had the misfortune of dealing with Watchers in the past. Never met one I didn't want to throttle afterwards."

Before Giles could really work up a head of steam, the vampire-with-a-soul appeared in the doorway and started making conciliatory noises. I just rolled my eyes and tuned the pair of them out as I went back to the book I'd been reading. I had no desire to play nicey-nice with a Watcher and a vampire. It just wasn't on my list of things to do before I died. Slightly ahead of sleeping with a vampire, but that's the sort of thing you end up doing when you allow yourself to get into a drinking contest with an old Immortal that's been practising alcoholism virtually since they figured out how to distill it into a drink. And I really didn't want to remember that in any detail, so I redoubled my focus on the book I was reading. Eventually the large-browed one disappeared.

Ms. Calender, who was rather attractive, I thought, stopped by not much later than that and Giles managed to talk her into using her techno-pagan mumbo-jumbo to find out about what was going on. I couldn't help but roll my eyes when I heard that. Honestly, why would a computer, of all things, be able to help deal with a vampire who was probably old enough to remember Jesus Christ from back when he was just some guy that most people wrote off as a crackpot? Didn't seem all that likely to me. Probably a good thing my disdain went unnoticed though. Youngsters tend to get stroppy when you question their modern peccadilloes.

More time passed; more books were read and discarded as useless. Really, the Master is just such a _generic_ title. I kept expecting a Time Lord to pop in and claim that he was the real Master or some such. Would have broken the tedium, if nothing else. I can only spend so much time reading before I want to go and _do _something that involves actual physical activity and I was very quickly approaching that threshold point.

Eventually the walking corpse returned. "I've got the book you wanted here," he said. "Have you found anything new?"

Giles lowered the book he'd been reading and leaned back in his chair, looking very tired indeed. "No," he said. "Nothing. It appears to be as I feared."

"There has to be something," said Angel. "Anything!"

"Take a look for yourself," said Giles, waving his hand at the table. "The Codex is most clear on what is to happen. It's clear. It's what's going to happen. It's what's happening now."

"Look, it's prophecy," I weighed in as Angel picked the Codex up from the desk and started to read through it for himself. "Even if you believe in it, it's clear as mud. Half the time these things don't even make sense till they've come to pass."

Angel looked up from the Codex. "It can't be," he said. "You have to be wrong, Giles."

"I've checked it against all my other volumes," said Giles. "Double-checked even, and had Xander here triple-check for good. I doubt we'll find anything new in these books you've brought."

"We have to try!"

"What's the point?" asked Giles, looking older and more utterly wretched than I'd ever seen him look before. "The Codex isn't some third rate village seer. It's solid."

"Well, there's gotta be some way around it."

For once, I found myself in agreement with an animated corpse. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves, not just a line from a popular movie.

"Listen," said Giles. "Some prophecies are, are a bit dodgy. They're, they're mutable. Buffy herself has thwarted them time and time again, but this is the Codex. There's nothing in it that does not come to pass."

"Then you're reading it wrong!"

For some reason, I was getting a very bad feeling at that moment. My 'something's about to go to shit' sense, finely tuned through many centuries of dodging final death, was blaring at me and I had no idea why.

"I wish to God I were!" said Giles, suddenly looking angry instead of defeated, his voice growing progressively louder as he spoke. "But it's very plain! Tomorrow night Buffy will face the Master, and she will die!"

Giles opened his mouth to speak, but he was cut off by the sound of female laughter from just outside the office, laughter that held no real mirth. I knew who it had to be from the sound, but I so very much wanted to be proved wrong as I turned my head to take a look. I wasn't; it was Buffy, her eyes wild with emotions I'd never seen there before. Giles and Angel exchanged a look and began to move out of the office as Buffy slowly backed away from them. I was rooted in position. So much life experience, and I still had no idea how to deal with a child who'd just been given a death sentence.

"So that's it, huh?" asked Buffy, her eyes gleaming. "I remember the drill. One Slayer dies, next one's called. Wonder who she is."

I wanted to say something, anything, right then to help her, but my mind was empty. It was just so wrong. This was why I hated the concept of the Slayer and the Council. For all I'd said before then, Slayers really were children, more so now than at any other point in history, and they were just too damn young. Adults fight, adults die. Not children. Never children. History had taught me how wrong that was.

"Will you train her?" Buffy asked Giles, tears beginning to fall. "Or will they send someone else?"

A sarcastic comment, some mindless quip, anything to relieve the tension, might have helped, but I was still paralysed by the look on her face. Maybe I was getting soft in my old age, but it tore at me to see Buffy like that.

"Buffy, I . . . " said Giles, sounding much like I felt.

"They say how he's gonna kill me?" asked Buffy, the tears flowing freely now. "Do you think it'll hurt?"

I was on my feet as she finished, though I couldn't tell you when I stood up. What to do? There had to be something that would help. Angel moved to offer her comfort, for what that would be worth, but she quickly moved away.

"Don't touch me!" she cried. And then she address Giles again, "were you even gonna tell me?"

"I was hoping that I wouldn't have to," said Giles automatically. "That there was some way around it. I . . . "

"I've got a way around it," declared Buffy. "I quit!"

"It's not that simple," said Angel.

"I'm making it that simple! I quit! I resign, I-I'm fired, you can find someone else to stop the Master taking over."

"I'm not sure that anyone else can," said Giles. "All the signs indicate . . . "

Buffy's expression took an unpleasant turn at that and she picked up a book from the table as she spoke. "The signs?" she asked. And then she threw the book at Giles, though thankfully she moderated her strength. "READ ME THE SIGNS!" Another book thrown. "TELL ME MY FORTUNE! YOU'RE SO USEFUL SITTING HERE WITH ALL YOUR BOOKS! YOU'RE REALLY A LOTTA HELP!"

As much as I will always despise the Watcher's Council, and as much as my relationship with Giles is antagonistic at the best of times, I couldn't help but feel sorry for him seeing the look on his face. Gods above, this whole situation was just wrong.

"No, I don't suppose I am," said Giles quietly. I'd been wrong earlier: this was the most defeated I'd ever seen him look.

"I know this is hard," said Angel, making a faltering movement towards Buffy, but before he could say anything else she cut him off.

"What do you know about this?" asked Buffy. "You're never gonna die!"

"Buffy, please," I said. "Try to calm down. This . . . "

"Calm down?" she screeched. "Do you even . . . no I don't suppose you do understand, because you're no more human than Angel is!"

Angel didn't react to that, he already knew that something wasn't normal about me, but Giles started.

"Buffy . . . "

"Can you even die?" she asked, her voice still containing that hysterical edge. "Seriously? I'm not stupid, you know. I've seen the hits you take without even flinching. You're not even close to human."

"Of course I can die," I snapped. "Everything dies. Me, you, Giles, Angel, everything. It's just a matter of time."

"Well, my time isn't now!"

"Buffy, if the Master rises . . . " said Giles.

Buffy yanked the cross from her neck. "I don't care!" she screamed. Then she calmed down. Very slightly, but she calmed. Honestly, I was half expecting her to attack someone as close to the edge as she was getting. "I don't care, Giles," she said more quietly. "I'm sixteen years old. I don't wanna die."

"Then don't," I said quickly. "I'll come with you! Together, we can beat this bastard and neither of us will die!"

She just shook her head, her expression heart-breakingly sad, and slapped the cross down on the library table before taking off. A few moments later I moved to follow but she was already out of sight and beyond my ability to track. A Slayer that doesn't want to be found won't be when she has that sort of head-start. That simple. I stood and stared in the general direction I thought she'd gone in for a few seconds before turning on my heel and returning to the library.

Angel was gone. Fucking bastard that he was, I wasn't surprised. Giles was just stood where he'd been when Buffy left staring at the library doors. My entrance didn't even seem to faze him. For a moment, I let watched him, the man looked utterly bereft, and then I spoke.

"Giles," I said. "Earth to Watcher. Come in. We need to talk."

He immediately turned a razor-sharp glare on me. "Yes, we do," he said. "We have a great many things to discuss it seems, Xander, if that's your real name."

"Not now, Giles," I said. "Just not now. It's not the time."

"Oh, I think it's _just_ the time," he said. "The Master's rising and I find out that someone close to the Slayer has been hiding their true nature. I think it's a _perfect_ time to discuss that."

"Fuck off, Giles," I said. "Seriously, just fuck off. I'm not some stupid fucking teenager that will fall in line whenever you start acting like a hardass. I was killing vampires when your ancestors were running around with shit smeared on their faces spearing each other over who got to fuck the village bike. Just tell me where the fucking Master is and we can part company."

If looks could kill, I'd have been incinerated on the spot. Most likely my ancestors would have felt it.

"You need some sort of proof that I'm trustworthy?" I asked. "Sorry, I'm all out of that. But maybe this will ring a bell: In the name of God, impure souls of the living dead shall be banished into eternal damnation. Amen."

I've never seen anyone's skin pale as quickly as Giles's did right then. I'm not even sure why, to be honest, it wasn't _that_ scary a bit of news for an old hand like him, but maybe he made a connection that went off the path I expected. "Hellsing," he breathed.

I simply nodded by way of reply, the sort of nod that only a contemptuous toff could manage, something I hadn't done since, oh, the First World War? Before? Most likely before. It was difficult to remember at times. That part of my life was very blurry; getting half your brains spattered over the Somme by machine fun fire will do that. It had been a damned miracle I hadn't released my quickening all over the battlefield and _what_ a mess that would have been.

"I don't really know," admitted Giles eventually. "Underground somewhere, I know that much, but nothing exact. Angel knows more, I think."

"Well, he'll be lurking around town sulking all day now," I said. "I'll never find him. He's too good at hiding. Time to go search, I suppose."

"You'll never find him," said Giles. "It's the proverbial needle in the haystack with this town's sewer system."

"I have to try. A quick assassination will end this right here, right now."

"And you think you can handle him alone?"

"I've dealt with worse."

"I suppose you have but there's no pet monster for you here."

I left at that. The conversation was taking a turn I didn't want to deal with.

* * *

Giles was right. I searched through that day, the night, and the day after with zero success on the finding-the-Master front. The sewers were as dank and disgusting as only sewers can be and they were like a fucking labyrinth, a demon-infested labyrinth. By the time I gave up, I was riding the ragged edge of exhaustion and had faced off with more mobs of blood-thirsty monsters than I'd seen since the sack of Rome. It was a miracle that I hadn't gotten myself killed but the fact that none of the things I ran into knew how to finish me off was probably as much to do with that as anything.

I knew that I looked a right mess as I clambered up the ladder and exited the sewer. My clothes were both tattered and stained with blood, both mine and that of various demons, and I was absolutely filthy. Add to that the inevitable stench that comes from wandering through a sewer - inescapable, that - and I'd have bet good money that people would cross the road to avoid me.

But anyway, the streets were empty. Absolutely devoid of activity. I'd felt something evil growing before I'd left the sewers, why I'd quit the search, but I hadn't expected that the wilfully blind population of Sunnydale would take the hint. It displayed a level of intelligence that I hadn't expected to find in the population of the town. Strange, really, considering the way they almost deliberately ignored the presence of the supernatural around them. Not that I'm one to complain about that: such idiocy is part of what allows those of my kind to keep our existence quiet.

I quickly made my way to the library. Whatever was going on, the Watcher would probably have the 411 on the situation and I wanted to know sharpish. I might have failed on one front when it came to keeping Buffy alive but that didn't mean I couldn't regroup and approach from another, less futile, angle. You don't just give up and mosey on home after one setback, not in a situation like we were facing.

When I entered the library I saw Ms. Calender and the Watcher sat at the table poring over books while Willow beavered away at the computer terminal Giles had on his desk yet never, ever touched.

"What is that . . . oh, you," said Giles. "I don't suppose you had any success?"

"I'd be so lucky," I said. "Did clean out a few demon nests, if nothing else, though. What's the situation?"

"Buffy's gone to fight the Master," said Willow, not looking up from the computer. I could see her chewing at her lip, though, so she was worried enough. "Jesse thinks he knows a way to help her and ran off a while back."

"What?" I hollered before turning on Giles. "You let her go? You bloody _Watcher_."

"And, again, I did not _let_ her go," said Giles. And then I noticed the bruise on his jaw. Ah. Maybe he wasn't so bad after all.

"And Jesse?" I asked.

"I don't have any authority over the boy," said Giles. "He does what he will. And you _have _been teaching him how to fight."

"Six months of mixed martial arts lessons do not a Slayer make," I exploded. "The kid has a good heart, but he's nowhere near up to this."

"Kid?" asked Willow, to be ignored by all.

"He'll be a vampire-snack in ten seconds flat going up against someone like the Master," I finished.

Willow immediately broke into babble. Not one of her more endearing habits in my opinion. Quite infuriating actually. I rolled my eyes and headed over to the table. "So, where did he go?" I asked.

"We don't know," said Giles. "He ran off before I could ask."

"Well, shit," I said. "Not even a general idea?"

"No," he said. "He just said that he knew a way to help Buffy and then ran off into the night."

"Typical," I sighed. "Well, there's nothing to be done about it now, I suppose. What's the script here?"

"We're trying to puzzle out where the Master will rise," said Giles.

"Any success?"

"Not yet. Well, let's think about it. The vampires have been gathering, they know he's coming, they will be his army."

"I can testify to that," I said. "Believe me, no shortage of bloodsuckers in the sewers."

"Do you think they'll gather at the hellmouth?" asked Ms. Calender.

"Well, the last time the Master tried to rise was the Harvest," said Willow. "He sent a bunch of vampires to get him fresh blood."

"Well, where did that go down?" asked Ms. Calender.

"The Bronze," said Giles.

"The Prom!" said Willow and I at the same time. Good thing I didn't bother to arrange a date for that. Not really in any state to go.

Giles stood up sharply. "We have to warn them!"

"No!" said Ms. Calender. "We'll go. You have to concentrate on demon killing. My car's in the lot." I started to follow them but Ms. Calender cut me off with a pointed finger. "And you can stay here too. No way I'm having you in my car like that. I can't afford that sort of cleaning bill on the wage I get here."

Well, what can you say to that? I backed off and returned to the table, though I didn't take a seat or touch anything. Touching a book in the state I was in would equal one lost head at the hands of the Watcher, no doubt.

"So, what are we to do, then?" I asked.

"We need to uncover the exact location of the hellmouth," said Giles. "That's where the main threat will originate from."

I nodded. "I'll go find a sink and wash my hands," I said. "Then I'll come back and see about helping with that."

It didn't take long to find the boys' bathroom, but it did take a while to find a sink that was pumping out water and not blood. Seriously, that's just wrong. I've seen some seriously nasty things in my time, but that disturbed me. I mean, if the taps are running blood, does that mean the reservoirs are full of blood? That's an awful lot of bodies right there. More than I'd seen in one place since the Somme or maybe some of the battles in the Pacific. Either way, I sure as hell didn't want to think about it too much.

When I got back to the library, I opened my mouth to speak but was cut off by a sound I truly was not expecting. A car. In the school. Driving. Inside the corridors. What the fuck? I was about to ask Giles if he had a clue when I realised that the car was moving _towards_ the library and made a snap decision to get the hell away from the doors before I went splat. Being hit by a car is no fun at all no matter how big or small they are. Flesh and bone just doesn't stand up well to steel.

Fortunately the car came to a skidding halt, at least that's what I heard, before it smashed through the library doors. A moment later, Willow and Ms. Calender came belting through the library doors with Cordelia, making a whole lot of racket all the while with their infernal screaming.

"Uh?" I managed.

"What's happening?" asked Giles.

"Guess!" snapped Ms. Calender by way of response.

And at that precise moment, a fist smashed through one of the circular windows on the library doors and started to grab at the girls, who were leaning on the doors in an effort to keep them closed. It didn't take a genius to work out what that fist belonged to; humans do not punch their way through windows as a rule, not sane ones anyway.

Willow started slapping at the hand with a sign and I went with Giles to get the library table. The damn thing weighed a ton and took some serious effort to lift and move but once we'd plonked it in front of the door, it would hold them for a while.

"Jesus," I said. "There must be an army of the damn things out there."

"Less talking, more barricading," said Ms. Calender.

And so we continued to pile more and more in front of the door. Book-cases, computers, photocopiers, everything we could get our hands on. The library had plenty of nice, heavy objects to pile up.

Eventually we interrupted by Giles's cry. "They're coming in through the stacks!"

That had Ms. Calender and Willow haring off to pile up bookcases in front of the French doors that led to the stacks while I continued to work with Giles and Cordelia at the main entrance. Barely a minute later, Giles himself ran off to secure his office leaving me alone with the cheerleader. Joy.

"What is that smell, dork?" she asked.

I just looked at her as if she was insane. We were about to be swarmed by an army of demonic killers and she was worried about my body odour? Bloody cheerleaders! Before I could make a suitably cutting reply a hand snaked through the already smashed window and grabbed onto Cordelia's arm. She screamed and looked panicked for a moment but before I could act her expression took a ferocious turn and she bit down _hard_ on the vampire's hand. The vampire screamed and let go.

"See how you like it!" she shouted through the window.

"You surprise me," I said.

"What, did you expect me to wait for a big, strong man to save me?" she asked. "Don't be so lame."

I was distracted at that point by the sound of Willow screaming. And then a vision out of my worst nightmares burst up through the floorboards, a giant, tentacled monster that filled me with an incomprehensible, endless dread.

"No," I said, crossing myself. "No, no, no. This isn't possible."

"The hellmouth!" shouted Giles, sounding pretty damn scared himself.

"What the hell is that thing?" asked Cordelia, her voice taking on a shrill edge. I was quite impressed that she was still functional, to be honest.

I didn't reply. I was too busy running through a list of demons in my head trying to find an alternative to what I thought it was and coming up dry. It just wasn't possible. Those things were supposed to be dead, or as close to dead as things that aren't even faintly mortal can get, but now there was one right in front of me in the flesh. I'm not too proud to admit that I was about five seconds from dropping all of my carefully constructed shields and barriers and summoning Alucard right there. If I was going to have to face a Great Old One, then I didn't see much reason to not bring out the biggest guns I had no matter the consequences.

But everything went to hell before I had time to pull down those centuries old defences and call my weapon to action. The beast had hold of Willow with one of its tentacles and began to drag her towards itself, drawing an absolutely terrified scream from her. Giles pulled an axe from somewhere and charged the monster at the same time as I drew my gladius and charged myself. There was no point to trying magic against this thing; it was _far_ more powerful than I would _ever_ be.

Giles got there a moment before me, he was impressively fast for an ageing mortal, and managed to land a blow with his axe that drew a screech of pain from the creature and made it reflexively release Willow. Unfortunately, for me, the creature instinctively lashed out with its other tentacles and struck me a blow that sent me hurtling across the library before I smashed into and through the wooden railing that surrounded the mezzanine and when I landed I felt a terrible pain in my mid-section and heard the sound of Willow screaming.

When I raised my head and looked down, I saw the jagged remains of a wooden fence pole protruding from my middle. And when I saw it, I began to feel it. It's been a long time since I experience pain of that level, and I almost bit through my lip in an effort, barely successful, not to scream. It took a lot to ride out the initial agony, but I managed it, and then came time to try and lever myself free. That effort died a premature death when I found that couldn't feel anything below roughly the bottom of my rib-cage and I slumped back down, bringing another wave of pain down upon me. I'm pretty sure I blacked out for a while there.

The next thing I knew, there was a skeleton attached to the similarly-jagged railing next to me and Buffy was looking down at me with sad eyes.

"Not dead yet," I managed, though it was a struggle. I just wanted to sleep. Not a good sign, really, even if I couldn't actually die from this.

Buffy blinked. "How?" she asked. Then she shook her head. "What do I have to do?"

"Get me off this," I said in a croaking voice. "And then dump me in a corner to heal. No hospitals. No drugs."

"Sure?"

I nodded. And then she lifted me. I blacked out again and came to when she lowered me to the ground in the corner of the library.

"How long?" she asked then.

I closed my eyes and thought about it. "Sunrise," I said finally. "I should be mobile by sunrise."

"We'll have to move him elsewhere," said Giles. "We've made too much noise; someone will investigate."

"No hospitals."

"Yes, I heard," said Giles. "We'll have to take him to my flat. He'll be safe there. Cordelia, can we use your car?"

"Umm, ick?"

"Cordelia," he said warningly.

"Okay," she said with a sigh. "I'll just have to nag daddy to get it steam cleaned."

I quite gratefully blacked out again when Buffy picked me up. And this time I stayed out; less painful that way, really.

* * *

When I came to again I was laid on a settee in what I assumed to be Giles's apartment. I still felt like shit, but I felt a lot better than I had before I lost consciousness the last time, that much was for damned sure.

"So, you're awake," said Giles.

"I am at that," I said. "Can't say I'm happy about it, but I'm awake."

"Your constitution is remarkable," he said. "You must have went at least thirty-six hours without sleep before you were ran through and less than eight hours on you are awake and seemingly functional."

"Comes with the territory," I said. "But I think explanations can wait till the others can hear them too. I don't fancy telling this story twice."

"Of course, of course," said Giles.

I propped myself up on my elbows and was about to swing my now functional legs off the settee when I suddenly found my own sword at my throat. I froze. Bad situation. Bad, bad, bad.

"Of course, what I'm really interested in is whether you're dangerous to us or not," said Giles cheerfully. "And I want an answer to that before you go anywhere."

"I have a soul."

"I know _that_," said Giles. "Pretty simple test for that, really, but we both know that you don't need to be soulless to be a monster. Your lot's pet monster is testimony to that, isn't it?"

"You have some balls," I said. "Killing a Hellsing is a quick route to an early grave, you must know that."

"Sir Integral Wingates Hellsing is the only living Hellsing," said Giles. "I know that for a fact. Of course, the forces that that family plays with? There's no knowing what tricks one could use to escape death. I want assurances."

"And what would stop me lying?"

"The truth spell around you."

"Easily broken."

"You start channelling magic, and your head comes off."

"And how do you know that will kill me?" I bluffed. "You've already seen how hard to kill I am."

"Not much can survive without its head," said Giles. "And even if you can, it would buy me the time to do something more, ah, final."

"You have me there," I said. "I'm not a vampire."

"I know that much," said Giles. "You've been out in sunlight often enough to prove that you're not demonic and you lack the fangs of the nosferatu. But there're plenty of other monsters."

"And I'm not a demon of any sort," I said. "Not a drop of demonic taint about me."

"You keep telling me what you aren't," he said. "But I'm interested in what you are, because you're clearly not human."

I clearly didn't have much choice. As much as I would spitefully destroy Giles and his apartment in death, I'd much rather survive.

"I am Immortal."

"And that tells me very little. I had already guessed as much. But many creatures are immortal; I would prefer something a little more specific."

"You are a bloody fool," I said, my temper wearing thin. "I am Immortal. Beginning, middle, and end of the story. It's not my fault that you and your masters don't know of my kind and if you don't take that sword away from my throat I _will_ do something _deeply_ unpleasant to you."

"You are in no position to make threats."

"You'd be surprised. You have what you wanted; release me."

Giles frowned down at me. He seemed to be genuinely confused by my belligerence, as if fear of death would override my anger at the situation for long. A long moment passed and then the sword was removed from my throat. I was on my feet a second later and glaring at the Watcher.

"My sword," I said, holding my hand out. "Give it to me."

Giles looked down at the weapon for a moment before looking up at me. "This is a genuine Roman gladius," he said. "I can't age it exactly, but it appears to be a Gladius Hispaniensis. This sword is two thousand years old."

"You are correct," I said with a nod.

"It belongs in a museum."

"It belongs in the hands of its owner," I said. "There'll be plenty of time for it to be on display when I'm dead. Give it to me."

"It's not even a terribly good weapon by any vaguely modern standard," said Giles. "But it is yours."

And then he flipped the blade over and handed it to me hilt-first. That took some trust. It would have been _very_ easy for me to take the hilt and just push the blade forward to run hum through. A single, short motion. I doubted his reflexes would be quick enough to dodge. I took the sword and eyed the blade.

"Needs fixing up again," I said. "Damn demon blood is corrosive."

"I can't believe you use it against demons," said Giles. "It's such a waste."

"It's what the sword was meant for," I said. "It belongs on the battlefield, not in a museum somewhere being eyed by snotty kids on school trips and arrogant old men. That would be the waste."

"Such is your opinion," said Giles. "Now, I believe you owe the children an explanation. Willow, for one, was quite traumatised by what happened."

"I suppose I can deal with that."

* * *

Famous last words, those. Willow had just about crushed his ribs when she saw him and then Buffy had worked on finishing the job.

"Hey, ease up," I said eventually. "I heal first, but I get hurt same as a human."

Buffy released me. And then she socked me on the arm. "Don't do that again," she said.

"Not planning to. Believe me, it wasn't pleasant."

"So what's the script, big guy?" asked Jesse. Ridiculous name that considering that Jesse was at least four inches taller than me, but whatever. He was a lanky streak of piss anyway and my training would have to go a very long way before that changed. "Got me curious."

"That's a fairly long story," I said with a sigh. "Longer than I want to be telling, that's for sure. In short, I'm Immortal. I don't age, I heal stupidly fast, and there's a bit of mystical crap in there as well but nothing worth much discussion. I can be killed, but it takes a lot to pull it off, and I'm not inclined to give away the secret."

"You don't trust us?" asked Willow, her eyes big and wet.

"You don't last as long as I have without picking up some paranoia," I said. "And what you don't know can't be tortured out of you by enemies."

Willow gulped, so naïve she was, and was quiet.

"I've seen you do things no human can," said Buffy. "A little too much strength, a little too fast. There's more than you said."

"You'd be surprised what a well-trained human can do," I said. "But I am magically-inclined and can use that for all the things you'd expect. Slayers were created by powerful magic, after all."

"You know about that?" asked Giles, his eyes shining with eagerness.

"Not _that_ old," I said. "No-one's that old. I know as much as you do. Probably less; your lot always kept that sort of thing close to your chests."

"We don't know all that much about it either," said Giles grumpily. "It's been lost in the mists of time."

"Lot of stuff ends up like that," I said with a nod. "Like the fact that the American Revolution was really because they didn't want to pay taxes. Interesting how that happens."

"And I say, hey!" said Jesse. "Defending the honour of our forefathers and all that."

"Your forefathers," I said. "I'm not really American. Or any modern nationality really. I'm quite happy to take the piss out of the lot of you equally."

"So what about the Brits then?" asked Jesse.

"Insular little island nation that drinks far too much tea and has terrible teeth," I said. "Though the teeth thing? Not so much these days. You should have seen them back in the Elizabethan times. They liked their sugar alright but without modern hygiene? Not a good idea. Not a good idea with it, really, but at least we have toothpaste these days."

"You can never have too much tea," said Giles dryly.

"Oh yes you can," I said. "Believe me, I know. I spent far too many years on that god-forsaken island before I headed for the New World and I had to drink far too much tea while I was there to be polite."

"You know, your family would probably be quite happy to see you again," he said, completely out of the blue.

I shook my head. "Never go back," I said. "First principle of staying hidden for my kind. That and they'd assume the worst. I don't need the hassle. I have other responsibilities now and they're making their own way well enough."

"Well, it's your decision," said Giles. "But she strikes me as being rather young for the position she was forced into."

"She was," I said. "But she can handle it."

"Is it just me or are they talking in code?" asked Buffy.

"Personal things," I said while glaring at Giles. "Things best left unsaid really."

Giles nodded. He wouldn't bring it up again, hopefully. Now I just had to hope this wouldn't make its way into his report to the Council, but I didn't think it would.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four: When She Was Bad**

I'd thought Sunnydale was a boring little town before the summer, but that was _nothing _compared to what it was like when the monsters went into hibernation. A pokey little one-Starbucks town does not do much to occupy the mind. There just wasn't anything there to do. Not that I was legally old enough to participate in most interesting activities. Seventeen years old again. What had I been thinking when I created this identity? A modern education and a little more security in the fake identity were not worth the boredom.

It wouldn't have been so bad if there'd still been some demons to have a scrap with. Mortal combat was never boring at least. But there was none to be had. I'd only seen a couple of vampires all summer and neither of them had been capable of giving me anything remotely resembling a challenge. They'd been kinda pathetic to be honest. Stupid and drunk on their new-found power. Neither confrontation had been all that satisfying.

Disturbingly enough, I had grown so bored that I would have welcomed another visit from Amanda. She always brought a good bit of trouble along with her, even if it tended to be a bit more, ah, potentially fatal than I generally preferred. It's at the point when you'd welcome a visit from someone who is little more than a perennial pain in the neck that you begin to grow concerned. It hadn't been that long since there was a 50/50 chance of violence when Amanda showed up in my life.

Even spending time back in LA with Faith hadn't really solved the issue of my utter boredom. Sure, it had been nice - very nice - to see her again, but I'd only been able to stay a week and then I was back to square one and no better off with it. Worse, even, because I knew there was something so much better, somewhere I desperately wanted to spend time, only a few miles up the road but barred to me because of those god-damned stupid laws.

And I really did want to be back in LA. It had been a ridiculously long time since I'd had a real family - Hellsing didn't really count, I'd never allowed myself to become emotionally invested in my heir for various reasons - and I missed it now that it was barred to me. There was so much that I needed to teach my daughter, so much that I wanted to teach her, and I couldn't. It was maddening. And what if she needed protecting? The girl was capable, for her age, but if a head-hunter got her in their sights . . . I wouldn't be able to get there in time.

I shook my head and stepped up the pace of my pointless patrol. There was no point in torturing myself with thoughts of someone murdering Faith. It was unlikely, and there was nothing I could do anyway. But still the image persisted in my mind of her body slumped on the ground missing its head. I'd seen more than enough corpses in my time to paint quite the vivid mental picture.

And then I felt it in the back of my mind, that painful buzzing feel that can only come from another Immortal being in the vicinity. Perhaps I had spoke too soon. It looked like I was going to have to face something more interesting than an idiot fledgling after all. My hand immediately gravitated into my long coat and grasped the hilt of the sword I was carrying. My gladius was not an ideal duelling weapon, but it would have to do. Carrying a longer blade would have attracted too much attention. Too hard to conceal.

A quick scan of the area revealed nothing. The night was dark and the many warehouses that surrounded me cast many shadows that could conceal a man from my sight if they were careful. I knew I was frowning as I cast my eyes around again. Whoever it was, they were better at hiding than I was at finding. An unfortunate situation.

"I know you're out there," I shouted. "There's no point hiding. You won't catch me unaware."

There was no response, but I hadn't really been expecting one. If I was being stalked by a hunter, then the first I'd see of them would be their blade making for my neck if they had any sense at all. It was a weak way to fight, but it was a most practical one considering my skill level compared to that of most hunters. As much as it irritated me, I could appreciate that.

The moments that followed were tense, but no attack came. Eventually the feeling faded and I found myself stood in the middle of an empty street surrounded by abandoned buildings with no indication that what I had sensed had been anything more than an over-active imagination. It was most vexing. If there was a hunter in the area, I wanted to get it dealt with quickly. Winter was coming and with it would come the demons. The last thing I needed was to have people hunting my head when the demons were out and about again causing their own particular brand of trouble.

I didn't feel like continuing patrol after that. There was nothing to be found and having someone after my head drained all the entertainment out of things anyway. Being the prey wasn't half as much fun as being the predator. I'd almost rather spend another night being interrogated by the resident geek squad about ancient history than continue my patrol at that point. Almost.

* * *

I approached the school with all the enthusiasm of a man walking the green mile the next day. The prospect of spending another two years in the hormone soaked hellhole known as Sunnydale High School did not fill me with joy. I was never, ever, ever going to create a new identity at such a young age again. The entire thing was just a very bad joke. It would have been hard enough to put up with the stupidity of high school cliques when I was a child, but when I was an old man it was a nightmare. Cheerleaders, football players, swimmers, whatever - they were _all _idiots.

Still, I had no choice. I'd made my decision, as bad a choice as it had proven to be, and then events had conspired to make it impossible for me to back out and find a new way to approach things. The system had gotten its hooks into me courtesy of an idiot head-hunter challenging me in broad daylight and it had no intention of removing them till I was a legal adult and hence beyond their reach. If I attempted to disappear and escape school, I'd have to spend the next several years dodging the police. Not that difficult for one with my skills, but also not a situation I wanted to find myself in.

On the up-side, I'd yet to be pulled into any ridiculous teenage mating dances. Being convicted of manslaughter as a teenager did have its upsides, after all, it seemed. It would have been nightmarish if I'd been pulled into the ridiculous games that teenagers play in order to attract a mate. All those hormones and urges and no idea how to deal with them, they are a true pain in the neck at that age.

As the school gates came into sight, I spied Jesse and Willow approaching the school with Buffy trailing along behind. An odd sight, that. It certainly didn't match up with the perky cheerleader Buffy I had grown used to who seemingly always had a smile and a quip ready to go.

Well, whatever. I'm no agony aunt; she'd get over whatever problems she had in her own time. With that in mind, I made my way over and greeted them. "Hey, guys," I said. "Nice to see you back in town, Buffy."

Buffy sent a somewhat half-hearted wave my way as the other two uttered their own greetings.

"So, ready for another exciting year of school, Xan?" asked Jesse. "I know I can't wait to begin."

"Be still my beating heart," I said flatly. "I don't know if I can cope with the excitement of it all."

"Oh, but we get to do advanced calculus this year," said Willow. "And medieval history. And-"

"We get the picture, Will," said Jesse. "You like school."

Willow nodded enthusiastically. "School's great," she said. And then she frowned. "Except for Cordelia. And Snyder."

"You don't like our beloved benevolent leader?" asked Jesse. "I'm shocked! Shocked, I say!

"Snyder's the sort of man that no-one, not even his own mother, could like," I said. "He's one of the few people who would be rendered less unpleasant if they were turned."

Not that I was still bitter about being forced to take part in some stupid talent show. No, sir, not a bit. I just thanked the gods on a nightly basis that no-one who knew me had been there.

The scowl that appeared on Buffy's face when she registered what I'd said was truly a thing of legend. "Don't be stupid," she said. "Vampires are evil."

I raised an eyebrow at that. Bitchy. "Any more insightful observations?" I asked. "Like, you know, the sky's blue, grass is green, teenagers are stupid, the Slayer needs to get that bug out of her ass, that sort of thing."

"Hey, hey," said Jesse. "We're all friends here. Let's save the venom for more deserving targets. Like Harmony. Just for example."

Willow made a supportive sort of noise in the back of her throat and that was the end of that. The talking ceased until they entered the school proper and ran into Giles and Ms. Calender on a flight of stairs

"Giles!" exclaimed Willow.

"Yo!" said Jesse. "G-man! What's up?"

"Nice to see you," said Giles. "And never call me that again."

I, of course, immediately filed that away. Giles wasn't so bad as far as Watchers went, but bugging him was still far too fun to be legal. Hey, what can I say? It's the small pleasures that make life worth living.

"Hi, kids," said Ms. Calender. I didn't like being called a kid much, but I don't suppose she could exactly call me anything else in a public place.

"Hi!" said Willow.

Giles quickly moved over to Buffy. "How are you?" he asked.

"Live and kicking," replied Buffy.

"Buffy killed a vampire last night," interjected Willow in an uncomfortably loud voice that had the whole group doing a quick recce of the area to see if anyone had overheard.

"I think you can get more volume if you speak from the diaphragm," said Buffy.

"Sorry."

"We've got vampires?" asked Jenny quietly. "I thought the hellmouth was closed?"

"Well, it's closed, but not gone," said Giles. "The mystical energy that emanates from it is still focussed in this town."

"Hellmouths never really go away," I said. "Not that I've ever heard of. Best anyone's ever managed is to lessen the strength of one by messing with the leylines and that took human sacrifices."

"Ah, yes, the Pavia hellmouth," said Giles perking up suddenly in curiosity. "The records on that are rather sketchy."

"And for good reason," I said. "Not many survived that effort and none of us wanted it to ever happen again. The whole thing was a disaster from beginning to end. We came within inches of causing an apocalypse that day."

"Well, you did accomplish your goal."

"No, we didn't," I said. "We wanted to eliminate it entirely. Our approach was based on obsolete magical theories and was fundamentally flawed. It's a miracle we didn't cause a disaster so terrible that it made Pompeii look tame."

"Pompeii?"

"_Don't ask._"

"Hmm, well, I wonder if this vampire was here for any particular purpose," said Giles finally, looking somewhat disappointed that I wasn't filling him in on the gossip.

"You're the Watcher," said Buffy. "I just work here."

"Yes. I-I must consult my books."

"Eleven minutes, mister," said Willow. "That's a dollar for me. I called more than ten minutes before he went for the books."

Jesse handed over the dollar. And then the bell rang for class.

"Time to go," I said.

We started to make out way to class, but before we got far Giles spoke up. "Oh, uh, Buffy!" he exclaimed. "I realise that you've just returned, but when you're ready I think we should start your training again."

"I'm ready," she said. "I'll see you after school."

"Well, I . . . I understand if you want to take a few days-"

"I'm ready," said Buffy, before turning on her heel and marching off to class.

"Hey, are we still on for my training tonight?" asked Jesse.

"Of course," I replied.

* * *

I quietly detached myself from the group when lunchtime came and headed outside to get some air. The gang might have been much more tolerable than the average teenager, but I could still only talk so much before I needed to get away. That day, it was Buffy getting on my nerves. I wasn't entirely sure what was going on with her - something to do with her near-death experience, I expected, though I wasn't sure; teenagers can always find so many reasons to turn pissy - but it didn't take much snippiness to exceed my tolerance.

It was, if nothing else, a pleasant day. The sun was providing plenty of warmth and the skies were nice and clear, and it was so much better than when I had lived in England. There's really nothing like spending a good run of time in the land of grey skies and rain to give you an appreciation for decent weather. It was probably the worst thing about that country; that and the smog, though I'd heard that was a solved problem by then. Then again, Victorian morals had been a real pain too. Hard to choose between those points of irritation.

I didn't get far in trying to decide which point irritated me more before I felt that painful buzz again. My hand immediately shot inside my coat and grasped the hilt of my gladius. It was unbelievable. Someone was coming after me in broad daylight _again_! I scanned back and forth, trying to find the hunter. My eyes passed over an endless horde of non-script teenagers before they settled on someone I recognised, a tall, bearded man wearing a brown trenchcoat.

"Kyros," I said.

"It's been a long time, Adrian," he said by way or reply. "You'd almost think that you were avoiding me."

"Names Alexander these days," I said. "And you did try to kill me the last time we met, if you recall."

"Ah, yes," he said. "That. Well, you did sleep with my wife, you know."

"I was drunk!" I said. "And she got me drunk! You know I do stupid things when I'm drunk; you thought it was funny once."

"Funny?" he snarled. "Not with my wife!"

"I still think that trying to kill me - repeatedly - was a bit excessive."

Really. It hadn't been my fault. The woman had got my drunk and then, well, you can guess the rest. Not my finest hour, to say the least, but not my worst either. At least she'd had a pulse and hadn't promptly made a good attempt at murdering me when she was done with the fun part. No, she'd left that to her husband. Her very angry, very unforgiving, much larger than me husband. Bitch. At least she'd been attractive. Sorta like an older, more mature version of Buffy with larger breasts. Very nice.

"I don't," snarled Kyros. "You deserved that and more. I doubt you've ever cared about anyone other than yourself in your entire worthless life, but I loved her, you bastard. I _loved _her."

"Well, that's a little harsh," I said easily. "I wasn't at my best when you knew me. Going through a cynical stage."

"Do you think I care?"

"Probably not," I said. "But I doubt she'd have wanted you to turn into some sort of vengeance-obsessed stalker. You say you loved her, but you're quick to disregard what she would have wanted."

"As she disregarded what _I _wanted when she spread her legs for you," he hissed. "I will have my vengeance. You of all people should understand that desire."

"I always was a vindictive sort," I agreed. "Not my finest personality trait, that. You really sure you want to follow in those footsteps, though? Believe me, revenge doesn't make you feel any better. Worse if anything."

"And yet you continue."

"Well, what can I say? It's hard to change," I said. "And unlike you, I have the skills to back it up. Do you really think you can take me, child? I was taking heads when your ancestors were walking on all fours and swinging from tree to tree."

Oh, that pissed him off. If looks could kill, my head would have been going one way and my body the other right there on the spot. "Do you think me a fool, betrayer? Not in public."

"I don't think; I know. You wouldn't be here otherwise," I said. "Honestly, you've just blown any element of surprise you might have had."

"It doesn't matter. You will die at my hand, surprise or not; I just wanted to make sure that you knew whose hand was setting the noose."

"I've heard it all before, kid, and from much scarier people than you'll ever be. I'm still here and I'll still be here when I'm finished with whatever scheme you're running."

"Your arrogance will be your undoing."

"I'm not the one who thinks their plan is infallible. You were a friend of a sort once, so I'll give you one last chance. Leave. Leave Sunnydale now, and I'll let you live."

Kyros laughed. "Enjoy your last days, Alexander. Your last moments will be anything but."

And with that he left. Idiot. His lust for vengeance had blinded him utterly. He had known better than to play with his foes like that once upon a time. I'd tolerated his bungling attempts to kill me for many a year because, really, I deserved a bit of pain but for what I'd done. Enough was enough, though. If it was going to be me or him, then I'd be the one taking the head. That simple.

* * *

"You're over-extending," I shouted, as I batted Jesse's wooden practice sword out of his hands and gave him a smart rap across the knuckles to go with it. "Keep the blade under control."

Jesse nodded and picked the sword back up from where it had landed. The boy had determination if nothing else. He quickly assumed a defensive posture and stood waiting for me to make my move. Well, if he wanted me to attack him, who was I to disappoint? I feinted to attack left and then came in from the right as he moved to defend that angle. Ah, he still couldn't read body language all that well. I didn't come in at full speed though and he managed to parry the strike and launch an easily avoided riposte.

Jesse then came at me with an overhand strike that I simply blocked. And then I kicked him in the gut before he could bring his defences into place. Silly boy needed to learn to think ahead. Before he could recover from that I moved forward, inside his guard, stabbed him in the ribs with the tip of the wooden sword I was wielding. It'd leave a bruise, that, but bruises taught lessons better than any amount of coddling.

"This isn't Rocky, kid," I said. "It only takes one good hit with a sword to do permanent damage."

He stepped back and took a deep breath before assuming a ready posture. This time I waited for him to attack. He didn't disappoint. The attack came in fast and wide, sweeping in at my waist, and I parried it high on my blade before riposting with a thrust aimed at Jesse's shoulder that he leaned away from in good time. He then aimed a thrust of his own at my neck which I quickly knocked aside before aiming a kick at his balls that he barely dodged out of the way of in time. If he was going to play hard, so was I. Being stabbed in the neck _hurts_.

At that point I stepped it up and aimed a rising slash at his right side which he blocked with a grunt of exertion before aiming a weak punch that I took on my forehead before pushing forward and slamming a knee into his gut and then dropping an elbow strike down on the back of his neck.

"Careful," I said. "You get hit in the neck like that for real and you won't be getting back up."

"Dammit," he said, drawing deep breaths to regain his wind as he gingerly stood back up straight. "Am I even getting anywhere with this stuff?"

"You must have noticed that you're getting stronger and faster," I said with a frown. "This isn't some crazy martial arts film, Jesse. I have a lot of years experience on you and an equally young body. You can't overcome that with a few scenes of hard training and then run off to save the girl. It doesn't work like that."

"So what? You're saying I'll never be as good as you?"

"I have advantages that no mortal enjoys," I said. "It's not fair, but that's life. Deal with it. You'll never be anything near as strong or as fast as Buffy either. Deal with it."

"So what's the point?"

"The world needs more than a single Slayer to do all the fighting. There's nothing wrong with playing a support role," I said. "Enough talking. Assume your guard."

And after giving him a moment to do so, I assumed the offensive. I came in a high sweeping strike that Jesse instinctively parried but before he could launch any sort of counter I attacked again, this time with a low swipe aimed at his thighs that he blocked awkwardly. I then proceeded to snake my blade around his and disarmed him with a flick of my wrist. He then aimed a punch at my head but I swept my practice sword up and rapped the edge of the wooden blade across his wrist.

"That's a hand gone," I said. "Start again."

Things proceeded along those lines for the rest of the time I spent with him. The boy was determined, but he wasn't the swiftest of learners or the most brilliantly talented swordsman I'd ever ran across. As far as his skills went, his form was sloppy and his speed was inadequate. But despite all of that he _was _improving. Not at the sort of exaggerated rate that an Immortal or a Slayer can manage, but certainly at an acceptable rate for a mortal.

Eventually, the sun began to set, and the training session came to and end. I wasn't foolish enough to be caught after dark in the middle of a training session in Sunnydale, not when I had a hunter after me. I was already pushing it by training Jesse at all when Kyros was in the area. Targeting friends and family is, after all, a time-honoured tactic for bastards looking to take heads. I was banking on him thinking to try such an approach with me and I think I had good reason to believe that. He'd said himself that he didn't think I'd ever cared about anyone, so why would he go after Jesse? It seemed unlikely.

Still, I warned him to keep an eye out for any dodgy types. And he seemed to listen. Not surprising really. Living in Sunnydale, you'd get used to having to watch your back, I suppose.

* * *

It took a couple of days before anything significant happened, a couple of days of utter dross. Buffy continued to be distant and snappish and it made attending school even more of a pain than it normally was. Admittedly, there was some humour in watching her verbally eviscerate Cordelia - humour that I appreciated, believe me - but the rest was considerably less amusing. Having her pull a cock-tease dance on Jesse as 'reward' for his saving her life was in very poor taste, in my opinion, and it certainly strained friendships. Honestly, why she'd bother with a _vampire_ of all things was beyond me to start with, but to use a living, breathing friend like that to make the worthless creature jealous? Pathetic. Between that particular source of irritation and having someone wandering around town planning on taking my head, it wasn't the best couple of days I've ever had.

They weren't the worst ever, either, to be fair. The time Rome had been sacked by a horde of barbarians led by The Kurgan took that title, and a teenage angstfest paled by comparison, but it still wasn't much fun at all.

Still, it was almost a relief when Buffy interrupted a conversation about how much of a bitch she was being with her pronouncement of the Master's bones being gone. At least something was happening.

"What would somebody want with the Master's bones?" asked Willow.

"Materials for making some sort of truly horrible furniture?" suggested Jesse. "I've heard of that sort of thing . . . "

"They're gonna bring him back," said Buffy, staring at Giles intensely and ignoring all others present. "They're gonna bring him back, and I seem to recall you telling me he was history."

"Buffy, I-I've never heard of a revivification ceremony being successful," said Giles, looking distinctly disturbed despite his words.

"But you've heard of them?" asked Buffy, though she needed no answer. "Thanks for the warning."

"Well, Buffy, Giles did bury him and-"

"Look, this is Slayer stuff, okay?" said Buffy. "Could we have just a little less from the civilians?"

"Okay, that's it!" half-shouted Jesse. "I've had enough. Quit it with the bitch-queen from hell act, okay? No-one's impressed."

Buffy's glare could have stripped paint. There was some real venom behind it, though I was last as to why she'd be angry with Jesse of all people.

"He's right," I weighed in. "You're getting on my last nerve as well."

It was at that point when Snyder showed his pug-ugly face. "I believe some of us have class?" he asked. "And some of us have jobs."

"Y-yes, well, I'll, uh, I'll see you all, uh, in the library later," said Giles. "We'll continue this discussion."

"About trout," said Willow. Worst attempt at deception ever. And then we quickly left. No-one said a word to each other for the rest of the school day. It was all very uncomfortable. Well, for the others. I enjoyed the quiet.

* * *

And so we met in the library when classes were finished and we hit the books. I really didn't need to be worrying about the Master's bones when I had a pissed-off Immortal gunning for my head, but I couldn't exactly blow them off, could I? The Master was dangerous and he'd already came within a couple of inches of killing Buffy and opening the hellmouth. His being brought back to life would be a seriously troublesome situation to be dealing with when I had someone gunning for me. It really was a lose-lose proposition as far as I could see.

It took a couple of hours but eventually Giles stood up from where he'd been sat and started pacing around the library, book in hand. "Alright, alright, I-I've got something," he said. "Uh, to revive this vampire they need his bones - uh, which they have - and, um, the blood . . . this is very unclear, of the closest person . . . uh, someone connected to the vampire."

I frowned. Blood magic. That was always a dodgy proposition. It took some serious preparation, and you still weren't quite sure what you'd get half the time. There was power in blood though; maybe even enough to resurrect a demon if they weren't too long dead and you had the right reagents and circumstances.

"That'd be me," said Buffy.

"Perhaps," replied Giles.

"We were close," snapped Buffy. "We killed each other. It really promotes togetherness."

"No," I said. "That's not right. You didn't actually die. Your soul shouldn't have left your body until you were braindead and beyond CPR."

Buffy waved me off. "Rule-lawyering doesn't change things," she said.

I just rolled my eyes. Children. And then a rock came flying through one of the library windows with an almighty smash. "Well, that's gonna piss Snyder off," I commented as Buffy caught the rock. It had a note wrapped around it and that note was kept in place by a bracelet. This was no random act of violence.

"This is Cordelia's," said Buffy, eyeing the bracelet. Well, trust a woman to recognise a random piece of jewellery. She unwrapped the package and dropped the rock to the ground before reading the note out loud. "Come to the Bronze before it opens or we make her a meal."

I was tempted to sic Alucard onto them for writing such an awful ransom note. Honestly, did they have no standards?

"We've gotta save her," shouted Jesse. Ah, young love. Or lust. It certainly couldn't be love when it involved someone as unpleasant as Cordelia.

"What do we do?" asked Willow.

"We ignore the very obvious trap," I said. "Short of flashing neon signs, it couldn't be any more blatant than this. She's dead already."

"I can't do that," said Buffy. "I'm going to the Bronze and I'm going to save her."

"You can't save a corpse," I said. "If she's there, she's dead. If she's not, you're not going to accomplish a damn thing."

"Watch me."

"I really don't like this," said Jesse.

"Nor I!" said Giles.

"Yeah?" asked Buffy. "Well, you guys aren't coming."

"What do you mean?" asked Willow.

"I can't do it anymore," she said by way of reply. "I can't look after you guys while I'm fighting."

"Because I'm _so _defenceless," I said. "I mean, I haven't been hunting demons since before this nation existed or anything like that, have I?"

"Whatever."

And with that she swept out of the library doors. Brat. Get yourself killed then. See if I care. No skin off my nose.

"Tsk," I said. "Children of today. No respect for their elders, that's their problem."

"Aren't you going to go after her?" asked Willow.

"Why? So she can bite my head off again," I asked. "I don't think so. I can see where I'm not wanted. She can look after herself."

"This coming from the man who turned Sunnydale upside down looking for a way to save her from the prophecy," said Giles.

"Yeah, well, there's none of that here," I said. "Just one girl being stupid. There are no Masters here. She'll be fine."

"I dunno," said Jesse. "She's been acting pretty weird."

"Teenage girls do that," I said. "She's still the Slayer."

And beyond that she's the Slayer that killed Lothos and the Master. That's quite the pair of scalps to have to your credit when you're playing in the demonic leagues. They were the Alucard of the demonic division of things and for her to have knocked them both off inside a year was quite the feat. The fact that she'd survived it was even more impressive. She was already gunning for the top ten Slayers ever.

"I think we should do some more research," said Giles. "We need to know more about this ritual."

"Indeed," I said. "Let me see. I have a talent for ancient languages."

Giles passed the book over and I quickly scanned it. And then I stopped in horror and read in more detail, confirming what I saw.

"Jesse!" I barked. "Weapons!"

"What?" he questioned, but he was heading for the cage as he said it.

"The trap's not for Buffy!"

The blood drained from Giles's face as he computed the possibilities. "Physical closeness," he said. "Oh dear."

"Oh dear indeed, Watcher. We are in some serious trouble and our forces are split."

Vampires. The mezzanine was crawling with them. And I felt the buzz again. Yup, we were fucked. Badly outnumbered and with our forces split, we didn't stand a chance. I must have been getting old and stupid to fall for such a blatant trap. Belisarius would have never been so easily caught and certainly not by demons of all creatures.

"I believe this is where I say 'I told you so'," said Kyros smugly.

By way of reply, I drew my sword. They wouldn't take me without a fight.

* * *

Waking up to find yourself hung by your ankles could never be called a pleasant experience, but it was a new one for me. I'd been hung by by neck once or twice - and that extraordinarily unpleasant, let me tell you - but this was a new one. Quite painful, too, I'll tell you for free. From the weight of my coat, it seemed that all my weapons had been taken. No surprise there, really. Vampires had a bit of thing about people having blessed weapons for some reason.

"I told you that you couldn't win," said Kyros. "But you wouldn't listen. Ah, victory. It is sweet beyond description."

"Don't count your chickens before you eggs have hatched," I warned. "I'm not dead yet."

"Oh, not long now," he said. "And you won't be getting out of the chains between now and me taking your head, so it's a moot point. Even you can't escape this."

"We'll see," I said. "But vampires? I thought you were better than that, Kyros. They're monsters."

"I use monsters to defeat a monster. It seems somewhat poetic, does it not?"

"A monster? This is coming from a man consorting with literal hellspawn. You are a hypocrite."

I would have said more but getting kicked in the diaphragm will shut even the most hardy of people up quite quickly.

"You will be bled to resurrect their Master, and then I will take your head. Your failure will be as complete as it can be."

"Oh, it gets better," I said. "Do you realise what you're doing? The Master will open the hellmouth as soon as he is reborn. You're going to bring about the End of Days for a bit of petty revenge."

"There is nothing petty about my revenge, betrayer."

And then he turned away and headed over to the vampires. Dammit, I had to escape, and I had to do it yesterday. Okay, inventory time. My hands were bound, my legs were chained to a rail on the ceiling, and I had no weapons. Well, it was a quick inventory if nothing else. I couldn't even work any useful magic without my hands free. I was fucked. Absolutely fucked. Dammit, I was too young to die!

"You sure do have a lot of enemies," said Cordelia from somewhere behind me. "Ever thought it might say something about you as a person?"

I groaned. Of all the people to be conscious, it had to be her. "Do you have anything useful to add?"

"Other than the fact that I'm far too young and pretty to die? Not really."

"Then shut up."

At that point the rail I was attached to started to move. They were starting the ritual. Some days, it just doesn't pay to get out of bed at all.

"Behold these four mortals," intoned a black vampire. "And behold this lone Immortal."

"I'd really rather you didn't," I quipped. "I'm no-one important."

I was ignored.

"Witnesses to our Master's wretched demise," continued the vampire. "They will breathe their last this night The blood that pours from their throat will bring new life to the old one! We gather for his resurrection. For the dawn of this new hell."

There really aren't words to describe just how utterly pissed off I was with the whole situation. A few moments of pissy attitude and a lack of awareness and now I was going to die. A real, final death at that. What a way to go. Everything I'd done and it would come to nothing. I wouldn't even get to see Faith grow up.

The black vampire had pulled a khukri from somewhere when I focussed my attention on him again. "For the old. For his pain," he intoned. "For the dark."

"For the dark!" responded the other vampires.

I began to focus my magic. If I was to die, then it would be with a curse on my lips. There is power in a mage's last moments and I would use it. The Master might be resurrected on my blood, but I would make sure it was a twisted, useless resurrection if nothing else. I could do no less. It was far too heroic for my normal tastes but I had few other options available to me.

And then one of the vampiric crowd exploded in a cloud of dust and everything dissolved into a chaos. It was a good chaos though. The sort of chaos that saves my life. Very good chaos indeed. I'd pay tribute to Janus that night in thanks. The rail was quickly pulled back over to its starting position and I've never been so happy to see a vampire in all my life as I was to see Angel at that moment. He quickly unbound me and I dropped to the ground in a heap. Not very graceful, but it takes a few moments to get the circulation going again after you've been hanged.

Now that I was the right way up I could evaluate the situation. Buffy was tearing through vampires like a whirling dervish of slaying, which was good, but where was Kyros? Ah, there. Jesse was attacking him with a short sword he'd grabbed from somewhere. The boy was attacking with a fury I'd never seen in him before but it wasn't going to be enough to keep the Immortal at bay for more than a few moments. I quickly palmed my gladius from where it had been dumped and headed over towards the pair of them.

Jesse, inevitably, fell and Kyros's sword would have cleaved him in two, but it was instead met by my blade.

"I'll take it from here, Jesse," I said. "You'd best go help Buffy."

He did so, knowing better than to argue with me when I used my 'I'm about to kill something' voice.

"I will have my revenge!" snarled Kyros, looking barely human.

"We'll see."

And then the battle was joined in earnest, swords flashing in a dizzying array of slashes and thrusts as we attempted to cleave each other in two. He'd gotten a lot better since I'd last encountered him and he had by far the superior weapon with his katana, so I found myself a great deal more challenged than I expected. I was forced inexorably back as his blade seemed to sing through the air in a series of elegant cuts that would have lopped limbs off with ease if any had landed.

I had to call upon all my reserves of defensive skill as I fended the twisted Immortal off, but it worked. He could not find a way through my defences even with a far better blade and the advantage of my just getting down from being hanged. The frustration came to be clearly visible on his face, and frustration is something easily exploited in battle. Frustration leads to sloppiness. Sloppiness leads to openings. Openings lead to victory.

And then I stemmed the tide. I stopped falling back and stood firm in the wave of the continued assault. Kyros had a strength borne of a centuries old hatred, but I had faced far worse than him and lived to tell the tale. I may not have been able to claim the head, but I had survived an encounter with the Kurgan intact; Kyros was nothing at all compared to that savage. It wasn't easy, but I did at. I stood firm and I looked him in the eye as he threw everything he had at me.

Eventually his movements slowed. Even the most powerful Immortal could not maintain that fury indefinitely and Kyros was far from that. His movements slowed and the advantage passed to me. I began my own attack, blade flickering in a series of probing strikes against his defences. Oh, he'd improved immeasurably since his last attempt at my life. I could break him at will then; not so now.

But he still wasn't my equal. His movements were growing desperate as he realised his plight, but there was no way out for him. He could not escape and I would not allow it even if there was a route available. Eventually a parry was a hair too slow, and I drew blood with a light strike against his left forearm. He fell staggering back with a look of sheer horror on his face. The knowledge of defeat was in him.

He was not going to go down without a fight though, and he hurled himself at me with an energy born of utter desperation. Once more I was forced into a retreat as he gained a second wind from his fear. He even came close to breaking through once or twice, but my skills proved equal to his fear of death and his second wind came to an end leaving him weaker than before.

It was just a matter of time then. Eventually his sloppy movements allowed me to break through his defences and a powerful cut I took his sword arm off at the elbow and sent it flying across the now silent warehouse. He fell to his knees and looked at me with eyes full of silent horror.

"In the end, there can be only one," I intoned, before I brought my blade down and hacked through his neck in a single powerful blow.

"Everyone, away from the windows," called out Giles as I dropped my sword to the ground. I heard footsteps and muttered speech, but I was beyond hearing it. I could feel the energy gathering.

And then it came. The world exploded around me Kyros's quickening was released into the air and then absorbed by my own power. Everything that was his was made mine for just a moment before I released the memories into the aether. I didn't need those. It wasn't the most powerful quickening I'd ever taken, but it was respectable enough, and I dropped to my knees when it was over, surrounded by shattered glass from the exploded windows.

"What the hell was that?" demanded Buffy with a hysterical edge to her voice.

"That was the quickening," I said, rising back to my feet. Damn but I felt my age. I hate taking quickenings. "It's what distinguishes people like me from people like you; it's the source of an Immortal's power."

I eyed the group. They looked distinctly on edge, and I thought I could see a trace of fear in Willow's eyes. That hurt. I didn't suppose the children had seen someone decapitated like that before though. The first kill is always the hardest. Giles looked quite alright though.

"I think we should leave quickly," said Giles. "We do not want to be here when the emergency services arrive."

"You guys can leave, but I need to dispose of the body," I said. "Only an idiot would leave evidence of the Game laying around."

"Game?" squawked Willow.

"That's what Immortals call it," I said. "A sick joke, really, but you have to have a sense of humour about it."

"I'll help with the body," said Angel.

I stared at him before sighing and nodding my agreement. "Fine," I said. "I can always use the extra muscle."

The others left and I promptly set about removing the body with Angel. With two pairs of hands, it was quick work to dismember it and then dispose of those smaller chunks. We didn't exchange a word except for my occasional directions to Angel. It wasn't perfect - there's not much you can do about the damage done by a released quickening - but it was enough to keep from Kurgan-style publicity.

* * *

The next day at school was one I approached with even less enthusiasm than normal. Being rejected by the gang wouldn't exactly be a crippling blow, but it wouldn't exactly be a high-point either. It wasn't like I could offer any sort of compromise either. If another hunter cam after me, I'd do the same thing. I had no choice in the matter. Passive resistance does not stop head-hunters, or at least none I've ever ran across would be stopped by it.

When I entered the classroom, I found Willow, Jesse, and Buffy sat together chatting away. When I approached, Jesse looked up and waved. "Yo," he said. "We saved you a seat."

Nothing to worry about. If they could accept Buffy, who'd nearly got them all killed, why would I have had a problem?


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five: Halloween**

"I can't believe this," I said. "I fucking hate Halloween, and now I've been conscripted into escorting some brats around so they can extort sweets from old ladies? God damn it, I think I preferred it when no-one dared talk to me."

"I bet we have to wear costumes too," said Jesse gloomily.

"Snyder said costumes were mandatory," weighed in Willow.

"Great, I was gonna stay in and veg," moaned Buffy. "The one night a year things are supposed to be quiet for me."

"I'll have to actually pay for a costume as well," I said with an expression of dawning horror on my face. "There's no way I'll be able to get anything shipped in from home now. Damn it."

I was too old to go running around in some stupid costume. I really was. That was a kid's game. It wouldn't have been so bad if I could have just worn one of my old outfits that I'd hung onto, but I was going to be stuck with some stupid trash bought from a costume shop. Wonderful.

"Halloween quiet?" asked Jesse as we walked into the student's lounge. "Huh? I'd have thought it'd be a big old festival for vampires."

"Not according to Giles," said Buffy. "He swears that Halloween is, like, dead for the undead." The girls sat down and I sat opposite them. "They stay in."

Jesse headed off to get a soda at that point as Willow looked at me. "So why do you hate Halloween anyway?" she asked, looking genuinely curious. "I mean, I know it's commercialised and all, but hate?"

"Memories," I grunted. "Pagan holidays being co-opted by Christians brings back some things I don't really want to think about."

"Halloween was a Roman holiday?" asked Buffy.

"No," I replied. "It was a Celtic holiday. Romans had Parentalia and Feralia, which were similar in a way, but Halloween is Celtic."

Willow had the history geek-out look on her face and opened her mouth to fire off another question before her expression suddenly shifted to a frown. "Jesse's in trouble," she said simply.

I twisted around to look and lo and behold it looked like Jesse was about to pick a fight with the school quarterback. Say what you will about American Football, but the players tend to be rather large, and the one Jesse was giving a hard stare to was no exception to that rule. Larry was not the smartest or most socially well-adjusted of teenagers, but he was certainly one of the largest I'd ever seen. Jesse was tall, yes, but Larry was also tall and had far more muscle than a seventeen year old should be able to carry. It was a mismatch.

Of course, I had no intentions of intervening in what was to come. Some lessons are best learned through pain, and being beaten by a schoolboy would be considerably less painful and far, far less dangerous than being beaten by a vampire. And I wasn't going to pick a fist fight with someone that much larger than me. When I have to fight someone larger than me, I go for the throat, the eyes, the joints. Doing that to Larry would get me into a ridiculous amount of trouble. It just wasn't worth it.

Unfortunately, Buffy was never one to see things that way, and she darted off to deal with the situation. Ah well. There'd be other opportunities to reel him in. Teenage boys were always quick to anger and Jesse was no exception; I'd get another opportunity sooner or later. The situation played out pretty much as you'd expect. Jesse moved to throw a punch but was quickly brushed aside by the much larger boy before Buffy bounced Larry off a wall and sent him scurrying away with his tail between his legs. All quite amusing, to be honest. Seeing some over-sized troublemaker getting bounced around by a tiny little girl will never fail to amuse. Never.

Jesse didn't seem to find it all quite as amusing as I did. Surprise. "Black eyes heal, Buffy," he snapped as he came within earshot. "Having a girl handle your fights for you? Not so much."

And then he stormed off in a huff. I laughed. I couldn't help it. It was too amusing. Ah, children. Such fragile egos. Maybe I could channel it into his training. That would at least be useful.

"I think I just violated the boy code big-time," said Buffy as she sat back down.

"Well, he violated the 'not picking fights with people twice his size' code, so how about we call it even, hmm?" I said.

"You're one to talk."

"I'm near impossible to kill; he isn't."

I also carried a variety of weapons at all times. Not a good idea to talk about that in public though. The times when you could carry a sword without anyone thinking too much of it are long, long past.

"Boys are fragile like that," said Willow. "Speaking of, how was your date last night?"

And that was my cue to zone out. I truly couldn't care less about Buffy's misadventures with the vampire formerly known as Angelus. She was being a fool as far as I was concerned, but she was old enough to make her own stupid mistakes. You don't learn from being cosseted. Adapt or die. That was a Slayer's life in a nutshell. She was a strange one as Slayers went, but she was still a Slayer and still had to deal with the situation.

Not that I could talk really. The amount of trouble I'd gotten into other the years by thinking with the wrong head was incredible. Darla and Kyros were just the recent ones. If you went all the way back to the beginning, you'd be able to come up with one hell of a tale of woe from my love-life. It's amazing the number of creatures out there that use seduction as a means to claim victims, it really is. I'd gotten better at avoiding them as I aged, but I still ran afoul every so often. Darla was the best example of that. At least I hadn't had Anyanka sent after me for a few centuries. That was some consolation. Being turned into a giant slug had been one _hell _of a nasty surprise.

And then I caught something from the conversation that aroused my interest. "That's a really stupid idea," I said. "You do realise that, right?"

"What?" asked Willow. "I think it's a great idea!"

"Watcher diaries will tell you all about what Angelus did to get his jollies," I said. "But, you know, unless Buffy's _way_ more kinky than I realised, she ain't gonna want to have anything to do with that."

I probably deserved the smack round the back of the head that I got for that.

* * *

The costume shop was oppressively busy when I finally got around to going to pick up a costume. Maybe it hadn't been such a good idea to leave it to the last minute after all, but it had been pretty damned difficult to motivate myself to come and pick up a costume when I really, really didn't want to bother with it at all. I wanted nothing to do with the whole co-opted, commercialised mess, but Snyder had given his orders and who was I to argue? It really had been a chronically stupid idea to start my new identity out so young.

Of course, I could just not go. What could Snyder do? Give me detention? That's a lame punishment even for actual teenagers. An extra hour spent lounging around the school waiting to be let out wouldn't bother me one bit. It wasn't like I had a diary full of social appointments I had to be dealing with. No, I was pretty much free and clear of responsibilities in Sunnydale.

Then again, social workers. He could so very easily sic social workers onto me if I crossed him, and I just didn't need that sort of hassle. Playing nice with the social workers took some serious effort on my part; it was just too tempting to tell them to go fuck themselves when they started in on me, and it wasn't always easy to keep my story straight when I had so many life histories to choose from. Such a pain. I'd fought in God only knows how many major wars and I was being kept in line by the threat of paper-pushers. What a fall that was.

None of the costumes exactly leapt out and said 'wear me' as I worked my way around the cramped, over-crowded shop. Most of what was available was very generic. Not a great surprise really. A generic Dracula costume based on the Bram Stoker novel or one of the old Hammer Horror films would be cheap as chips to buy; a costume based on one of the latest crazes wouldn't be anything like so cheap. And there was _no way in hell _that I was going to wear a Dracula costume for very obvious reasons.

"Can I help you?"

I turned to face the man who had attempted to sneak up on me. He wasn't anything special looking, just a middle-aged man in decent condition. "I need a costume," I said. "Something that wouldn't be best suited for a small child like most of what I've seen here."

"Ah, of course, of course," said the man. "It wouldn't do for one of your age to wear such a thing. I understand."

It was all I could do not to laugh in his face. The presumption was understandable but still highly amusing. "Yes," I said. "I need something that would allow me to carry a sword as well."

The man perked up at that. "A sword?" he asked.

"Family heirloom," I said by way of explanation. "It doesn't get much use these days."

"What sort of sword?"

"Short."

"Ah, well, I have a few costumes that could go with," he said. "A shame it isn't something larger. I have some very interesting costumes that a broadsword or something similar could go with."

I just looked at him evenly and waited for him to elaborate.

"Do you have any preference for costume period? Past? Present? Future?"

"Not past," I said. I wasn't interested in wearing some poorly made knock-off of something I'd worn or seen worn during my life. It would just be embarrassing. At least a poorly-made knock-off of something from a fictional future wouldn't be as noticeable.

"Hmm," he said. "Let me think . . . yes, I have something that should be perfect for you. Some sort of soldier from a post-apocalyptic world. You look like the sort of man that could handle it."

I restrained myself from rolling my eyes - barely - before I replied. "It's expensive, isn't it?"

"Frightfully so," he said. "It's a custom job and it took some time and expense to put together."

"You don't even know it specifically is and yet say it's a custom job?" I asked, sending a fierce glare the man's way. "You'd best not be trying to rob me."

"Ah, not at all. It was a friend of mine's work," he said. "He's an aficionado of the genre and talked me into funding the costume's creation."

I couldn't detect any dishonesty about the man beyond the usual shopkeeper's desire to make a sale even if the goods weren't ideal so I let it pass. "Very well," I said. "Let's see it."

He scurried off to the back of the shop to collect the costume and I simply waited. It was strange that he would devote so much time and effort to a single costumer when the shop was so busy, but if it was an expensive costume I could understand it. The other customers were almost entirely children and weren't likely to spend more than a few dollars on what they wanted and weren't terribly discerning or picky about either their costumes or the quality of the service. He was just a shopkeeper anyway, so why worry about it? Selling me a dodgy costume wasn't exactly going to play into a nefarious plot.

What he brought out wasn't too bad actually. Some sort of green body armour, a green helmet, a pair of sunglasses, some brown trousers, boots, and an assortment of plastic weaponry. It wasn't anything special, but I didn't care enough to question it outside of one rather blatant issue.

"I don't see how a sword goes with this," I said.

"Ah, but that's the beauty of it," he said. "Look at the weapons that come with it already. Would an extra sword be out of place? I think not."

He had a point. I paid my money and took the costume.

* * *

The costume was not comfortable. The fake body armour was both highly rigid and entirely the wrong size for me: too narrow in the shoulder, too long in height. Still, the rest wasn't too bad. On top of that, the helmet looked and felt terribly stupid and the trousers were also too tight and too long. The whole outfit was designed for a taller and leaner man than I. The shop owner, Ethan, had been playing games when he sold me it. I'd be having words with him when I took the costume back.

Most of the fake weapons were easily replaced by the real weapons I had stashed at least if nothing else. The stupidly large plastic handgun replaced by one of my Colts, the machete with a large dagger I kept, and so on and so forth. The only weapon I couldn't substitute was the assault rifle. A real FN FAL would have just been too easily spotted so I didn't keep one. I preferred Heckler & Koch weapons for when I needed something that could really deal the death anyway.

I got a few odd looks as I made my way across town to the Summers' house. No surprises there. The costume _was _quite odd looking and would have been even if it had fitted me properly. So much for not looking like a complete idiot. Ah well. Not like there were many people in the town whose opinions I gave a shit about really. Hell, there weren't that many people whose opinion I gave a shit about period. I just didn't need to be spending the next few centuries hearing about the stupid costume I'd worn.

The door was answered quickly when I arrived at the Summers' house. "Mrs Summers," I said with a nod.

"Ah, Xander, right? Come in," she said, her expression carefully neutral. "Buffy and Willow are still getting ready."

The house was your typical American home. Nothing really distinguished it from what you'd see in a million different homes across the country. It was nice enough - certainly better than the Harris household - but nothing distinctive.

"I was surprised to hear that my daughter had befriended you," said Mrs Summers. "The last I heard of you in LA, she wasn't your biggest fan."

"The feeling was mutual," I replied. "She's changed a lot since those days. Changed for the better, I think."

"Oh?"

"She was a cheerleader," I said dryly. "It would have been hard for her to change for the worse."

"Hmm. I remember what happened with you."

"That doesn't surprise me. I imagine it was quite the hot news item at the time."

"That would be the understatement of the year," said Mrs Summers. "I'm not sure I like the idea of someone who did something like that spending time with my daughter."

That got a raised eyebrow. "If you really thought I was dangerous, we wouldn't be having this conversation. You wouldn't have allowed me into the house."

"I have to know," she said simply. "The fact that you're carrying a real sword - I worked in a museum once, I can tell - strapped to your back now doesn't exactly fill me with confidence."

Damn. I'd been counting on Sunnydale blindness to conceal that. If she could spot it, and she was as blind as anyone, then what? I couldn't exactly afford to go without it. It would be just my look to be attacked on the one night I wasn't properly armed. "It's a family heirloom," I said. "Do you really think a genuine gladius would be a useful weapon after this many years?"

Didn't even have to lie.

"Looks sharp enough to me," she said. Damn woman. "But that's not really the point, is it? You killed somebody with a sword and now you're running around carrying a sword. You have to admit, it doesn't look good."

"I'm not much interested in how I look to people."

She didn't even bother to dignify that with a reply. Gods above, it was ridiculous. I was far too old to be getting grilled by some girl's mother.

"Look," I said. "I'll defend myself if I'm attacked, but I don't go looking for it. I'm no danger to Buffy. Quite the opposite in fact. I'll make sure she gets away safe from any trouble if I can."

"And how do I know I can believe you?"

I shifted uncomfortably. "There isn't much I can offer there," I said. "You have no reason to believe my oath."

"It would make me feel better."

Well, if that's what it would take to get her off my back, it was no skin off my nose. "I swear on," and I stopped for a moment to search for something that would have meaning for us both if I swore on it, "my eternal soul that I am no danger to your daughter. Will that do?"

"A bit dramatic, but I suppose it's the best I can hope for."

I shrugged. It wasn't like she'd have accepted an oath on the lares or anything like that and an oath sworn on the Holy Bible would have meant little to me. I'd played at being Christian for a long time to fit into society, but that was about the limits of my beliefs on that front.

"Are you interrogating him, mom?" asked Buffy from the direction of the staircase. "He isn't my boyfriend, you know."

At that point, we were interrupted by a knock on the door. I was still somewhat stunned that the possibility of that had even been considered by Buffy's mother. I was . . . it would be wrong on an _epic _scale. It would be wrong enough if I was a normal adult, but I was older than the nation she was a citizen of! There aren't words in the English language to describe how wrong it would be for someone as old as me to get mixed up with a teenager in this day and age.

"Looking good, Buff," I heard Jesse say from the door. "And nice boo, Willow."

God damn, I should have gotten to the shop earlier, I realised at that point. Jesse got to the be The Man With No Name while I got to be . . . hell if I knew. Some nameless dweeb in green armour. And I really couldn't believe that I'd used the word 'dweeb' even in the privacy of my own mind. He was right though. Buffy did look good. The old-fashioned dress suited her a lot better than her normal attire did in my eyes, but maybe I was just getting old.

* * *

I spent the next several hours on autopilot. Escorting a bunch of snot-nosed brats around the streets of Sunnydale wasn't exactly a great or interesting task. A demon attack would have livened it up a bit, but they don't normally come out to play on Halloween for whatever reason. That left me with nothing more interesting to deal with than the occasional childish squabble and those were easily cut off before they amounted to anything by my drill sergeant impression.

We were approaching yet another anonymous house when I felt something in the air and stopped dead. The hellmouth was the great equaliser when it came to supernatural senses, but I was still getting cold fingers running up and down my spine right then. Something was happening. Something big.

And then the world went black.

* * *

I wasn't dead. That might seem a strange thing to say, but it was a bit of a surprise considering that one of the slavers from the Den had just unloaded half a magazine of 5.56mm into me from his assault rifle from point-blank range. I've survived worse in the past, sure, but I had a suit of working powered armour back then. Not much short of the first of God can kill someone in one of those things. In plain, old combat armour? Not gonna happen. You get that many bullets in you at that range, and it'll give, and you'll die. Painfully.

Okay, so I wasn't dead. No complaints there. Problem was, I wasn't even in the wastes anymore. Last I remembered I'd been in the rough, scrubby terrain near Arroyo delivering some good old fashioned death and destruction to scare the slavers away from the village, but this sure as hell wasn't the right place. I was in a town and there were roads that looked like they'd been maintained and cars that looked like they'd actually work and, hell, electric lighting! Actual, working electric lighting! Not something you see often in the wastes that. Even The Hub hadn't used its power so frivolously.

It just all looked . . . well, new. Everything was shiny and new and the decay I was used to seeing everywhere just wasn't present. Maybe I just wasn't seeing it because it was night, but, hell, I didn't think so. The electrics were letting me see pretty damn well, much better than I was used to seeing during night-time anyway. Was almost like day really. Quite incredible. I hadn't seen electric lights since I was kicked out of the Vault. Took some getting used to again, it did.

So I wasn't in Kansas anymore. Okay. So where was I and how the hell did I get there? I'd seen some strange things during my life in the wastes, but nothing that could explain that. Maybe it was the delusions of an old man about to finally break down and die? Hell, it'd explain a lot. Place was like paradise to someone used to the wastes. If my brain was going to break down and conjure up some place to escape to, that'd be the sort of place I'd end up at.

Course, that didn't mean I could slack off and just assume. Living in a world with twenty foot long scorpions and Super-mutants'll teach you to not just dismiss the strange stuff that sometimes pops up. Not like suddenly appearing in some really nice looking town missing a few holes in my chest was any weirder than the Master. Hard to top some sort of funky mutant thing that was, well, it's hard to do that guy justice with words. He'd started out as a man, but the Forced Evolutionary Virus had changed him. Wasn't nothing human 'bout him by the time I met him. He was part machine, part mutated animal, and part mutated human - and all weird. Anyone with a frigging brainwave monitor where their chest should be redefines weird.

Okay, that was new. A child-sized mutant - at least I think it was a mutant - with red, flaky skin and horns as large as my hands was eating a cat. A live cat. Okay. That one was new. Normally people at least killed the animal and cooked it before eating. Can give you all sorts of illnesses otherwise. Suppose you could combine the cooking and killing stages, but that's just cruel.

"Xander!" I heard a female voice yell from somewhere behind me. Sounded young.

Wasn't me, so I didn't turn to look. And then a hand appeared _through_ my chest. That got my attention. I promptly whirled around and levelled my assault rifle at the person I found behind me: a pretty young redhead wearing some seriously skimpy clothing. Oh boy, if I'd been twenty years younger . . . and she wasn't some sort of weirdo. Ah, no time for that; she could be dangerous.

"What the fuck are you?" I barked, clicking the safety of my rifle off as I spoke.

The girl looked like she was about ready to wet her knickers. Weird. "I . . . I'm Willow!"

"That's your name," I said. "What are you?"

"You know, it's kinda rude to point a rifle at a lady," drawled a male voice to my left.

Shit. Ambush. I tried to spin around to get a shot off in time, and I moved a hell of a lot faster than my old bones should have allowed, but I caught a bullet in the chest that knocked me backwards. No penetration. Ha! That's what you get when you pick a fight with someone wearing armour and don't have armour piercing bullets. I was about to return fire when the girl jumped between us waving her arms like a lunatic. Okay, not an ambush.

"Stop!" she screeched. "You can't kill each other, Xander, Jesse!"

"Name's Albert," I said. "Not Xander or Jesse. Now what the _hell _is going on?"

"I don't know!" she said, her voice taking on the shrill edge of panic as she went on. "It's Halloween, we were all dressed up in costumes, and now we _are _the costumes."

"Right," drawled the man who shot me. He was a predator. Pure and simple. I'd seen his sort before. Faster than me on the trigger, too, I'd wager. Not a good combination. I'd never seen a gun like his before, though, and it not getting through my armour was a good sign if nothing else. "What's next? Santa Claus coming along?"

"Oh, hush," snapped the girl. "Does this look like the Wild West to you? Seen anything like this place before?"

Ha. She had some bite to her after all. "So, if this is a costume," I said, looking the girl up and down, a fine sight I must say. "What were _you _dressed as, red?"

"A ghost," she said with a delicate blush. Ha! Still got it! And with that that I had the pistoleer dead to rights. If she was a ghost, and it matched with what had happened earlier as insane as it was, then I had a clear shot on an unarmoured man. One twitch of my finger and he'd be dead as dead gets.

"Well, I think my business here is concluded," said the gunman. "Don't let me keep you."

"Oh no you don't, mister!" snapped the girl. "You are not running off and getting my best friend's body killed."

"No worries there," said the gunman with a tip of his hat. "I'm real good at not getting killed."

"You don't have the faintest idea what's going on here or what you're up against."

"I'll figure it out."

At that point a, well, I have no idea what it was ran past. Some sort of half-dog, half-man thing maybe? Who knows. It was pretty damn ugly whatever it was. Not a face you'd want to wake up to in the morning, that's for sure. I've seen toilets that are more attractive.

"Right," said the girl. "See now?"

"Right, so what's your plan, lady?"

"We need to find Buffy," she said. "She'll know what to do. And my name's Willow!"

"Who the hell calls their kid Buffy?" I asked. It had to be said.

She just looked at me. And then she shrugged. "Not my idea of a good name, either," she said. "But she's all supergirl and stuff, so she'll be able to tell us what to do."

Well, I didn't have a better plan. And neither did Mr. Quickshot, so along we went. Entire thing was beginning to spook me to be honest. Ghosts? Me not being real? Way over my head. Mutants were one thing, they had a proper, understandable reason to exist, but ghosts were something else entirely.

* * *

"Supergirl," I said. "Right. Very super."

Willow glared at me, but, honestly, if she was going to send us after some supernatural warrior-queen then it'd be nice if the warrior didn't take one look at us and flake out. It was pathetic really. Hardly a first for me though, Katja hadn't been half as useful in a scrap as she'd made herself out to be back in the day and hadn't lasted long at all when things turned serious.

"You're wasting my time," said the gunman calmly. Ha. Calm he might have been but that didn't mean he wasn't going to do anything nasty. I always hated dealing with that sort.

"I'm not!" said Willow, stamping her feet in frustration. "She, oh, she must have been caught in the spell too."

Before anyone could say anything else, something roared behind us. The gunman was, predictably, the first to react, his poncho whirling around him he turned on his heel and fired a shot that would have caught a man square in the heart. Unfortunately, what he was shooting at wasn't anywhere near as tall as a man and promptly scurried off after getting a bullet-delivered haircut.

"No! No shooting! They're just kids in there!"

"Don't look like no kids I've ever seen," said the gunman.

"And you don't look like any guy I've ran across before," I said. "Shit ain't making sense. Let's just go along with the girl till we know what's going on."

He gave me one hell of a long, hard look, but eventually he gave me an ever so slight nod of assent. I was seriously ready to just pull the trigger and mow him down by the time he nodded. Man was tripping all my instincts. People like him, you across them in the wastes, and chances are you'll never be running 'cross anyone else ever again. He was damn quick with that pistol of his and if he was a good shot even armour wouldn't save me a second time.

"Why are you so ready to believe her anyway?" he asked eventually as Willow moved over to the girl that had just fainted in front of us and kneeled beside her. "You don't strike me as the naïve type."

"I'm not," I said. "But none of this makes sense otherwise. I was a creaky old man having one last adventure and then suddenly I'm here and way quicker than I should be. Nothing's right. My armour don't even fit properly and it ain't exactly new."

He nodded and then looked to the girls. I followed his gaze and saw that the one that'd fainted was coming back round.

"Buffy, are you alright?" asked Willow.

"What?" asked Buffy.

"Are you hurt?" I asked.

Buffy goggled at me. Honestly, I don't think I've ever seen anyone look so utterly clueless before. "Buffy, are you hurt?" asked Willow.

"Buffy?" she asked as she sat up.

"Great," moaned Willow. "What year is this?"

Buffy paused and looked at Willow as if she'd grown a second hand. "1775, I believe," she said.

"What!?" I barked. "That's . . . that's not possible. I was right with my first guess; this is some sort of delusion. I'm dying or dead or whatever."

"It isn't 1775," said Willow. "It's 1998."

The gunman had gone absolutely still. "That's no better!" I said. "Worse! A time before the war but when technology was good. Great delusion-fodder for someone who lives in the wastes. You'll be telling me you still have oil next!"

"Well . . . "

"A DEMON! A DEMON!" cried Buffy, leaping to her feet and moving to my side, pointing beyond my field of view. "A DEMON!"

I turned to face the 'demon' and actually dropped my rifle in shock. It was a car! A real, live, working car! With headlights and windows and everything! Suddenly, I felt very, very out of my depth. I'd saved the world once upon a time, but I had no idea how to deal with a world that wasn't post-apocalyptic. The nukes hadn't been dropped and I was centuries away from even being born. Not only was my wife not alive but she hadn't even been born yet. This wasn't my world. I was a fish out of water.

The gunman didn't look much better off than me. He still had his pistol in hand but he was immobile and his face looked very, very pale. I wondered what year he was from. Not mine, I didn't think, but who knew? I'd only ever been around the Western seaboard and a bit of the interior, and I really had no idea what the world was like outside of that area. Bad, I assumed, but it wasn't like we had much in the of mass communication a hundred years after humanity had virtually annihilated itself. Could be from Canada or the East for all I knew. Maybe even Europe.

"We should get inside," said Willow. "Come on, I know a place."

I collected my rifle from where it had fallen and followed along in silence.

* * *

I marvelled at the luxury of the house. Even the water merchants of The Hub couldn't have have afforded to live in such luxury. It was just something else entirely. Everything about the place oozed money to me. You just didn't see things like electric lighting in houses where I was from. Only Vault 13'd had that sort of stuff and that place was crowded, sterile, and just generally stuffy and isolated from the real world. Not that that was such a bad thing really. No-one's ever going to be worse off isolated from the wastes.

"Hello?" called out Willow as she followed me into the house. "Mrs Summers?" There was no reply. "Good, she's gone."

I heard the door click shut behind us and then, "looks clear," said the gunman, moving to stand by the door. "Nice house."

"Where are we?" asked Buffy.

"Your place," said Willow. "Now we just need to-"

Willow was interrupted by something banging at the door. I immediately went down to one knee and aimed my rifle at it. If anything came through, I'd drop it. The gunman had his pistol in hand, still, and was holding himself ready to deal with anything that came through. Nothing did and eventually we relaxed slightly.

"This . . . this could be me," I heard Buffy say from behind me, and I turned to face them, slightly curious. She had a picture frame in her hands.

"It is you," said Willow. "Don't you remember at all?"

"No! I-I don't understand any of this. Uh, uh, this is some other girl!" said Buffy, putting the picture frame back down. "I would never wear that low apparel, and I don't like this place, and I don't like you, and I just wanna go back home!"

She was almost in tears by the time she was finished. It was, quite frankly, the most pathetic display I'd ever seen. Even that fat old vulture Gizmo had been less of a snivelling wimp than that and he'd been barely able to get up from his chair and waddle to his bed under his own power.

"You are home!" exclaimed Willow before turning away from Buffy in disgust. "She couldn't have dressed up as Xena?"

I had not the faintest idea what she'd just said but I nodded anyway. Before I could try and wheedle some more information out of her, I heard a smashing sound from the direction of the door. My reactions were quicker than they'd _ever _been as I turned to face the sound and aimed my rifle at its location. A hand, a green hand at that, was sticking through the door where there had been a small glass pane. The gunman simply pointed his pistol out of the hole and opened fire. The hand withdrew immediately.

"Hey! What did we say?"

"I didn't shoot it," said the gunman, looking faintly disgusted. "I just scared the thing off."

He then cracked his revolver open and set about reloading it. Not a quick task that but he was working through it with the speed and accuracy of a pro. He'd only managed to slip a couple of bullets into the chamber when we heard the woman's scream though.

"Guess that's one for me then," I said. "Be back in a jiffy."

And then I was off, but not quick enough to miss Buffy's, "surely he will not abandon us?" Stupid girl.

* * *

What I found outside was some bizarre and massive bipedal, dog-like creature along with a rather curvy young woman in a form-fitting outfit that resembled nothing I'd seen in my travels. Well, whatever. The creature was obviously threatening the young lady, and, with what Willow had said in mind, I fired a three bullet burst into the ground near its feet. I suppose my rifle wasn't loud enough to scare it because it immediately started lumbering towards me. Well, I'd tried. My next burst caught it in the shoulder and the creature roared in pain before lumbering off into the night, clutching its shoulder all the while.

"Into the house," I barked at the girl. She didn't need telling twice. She was off as soon as the words left my house and I quickly followed, keeping an eye out for anymore trouble all the while. There didn't seem to be anything else in the vicinity, but caution was generally a good idea in that sort of situation.

* * *

"Cordelia!" exclaimed Willow.

"Wait a . . . what's going on?" she asked, casting a nervous glance at the gunman and myself as she spoke.

"Okay, your name is Cordelia, you're not a cat, you're in high school, and we're your friends," said Willow. "Well, sort of."

"That's nice, Willow," replied Cordelia. "And you went mental when?"

"You know us?"

"Yeah. Lucky me. What's with the name game?"

"A lot's going on."

"No kidding. I was just attacked by Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced Boy. Look at my costume!" replied Cordelia, waving an arm clad in torn material around as she spoke "Do you really think that Partytown's gonna give me my deposit back? Not on the likely."

"So what's the plan?" asked the gunman. "We can't stay here all night. Ain't exactly a fortress."

Willow stopped and thought about it for a moment. "I'll go get some help," she said. "You guys stay here."

"Who died and made her boss?" asked Cordelia as Willow promptly ran through the wall.

"That would be her," I said. "Okay, cowboy, you'd best check upstairs and see if it's locked up. If we're going to be stuck here, we might as well be secure."

He raised an eyebrow at me, but after a moment of tense silence he simply nodded and left to do as I instructed. It was all I could do not to sigh in relief.

"You, Cordelia, help me barricade this door," I said.

"Who said I'd follow your orders, Xander?" asked Cordelia, looking outraged at the very idea.

"I'm not Xander," I said. "Don't know if you've noticed, but this isn't exactly a normal night. Now get moving."

She didn't budge. "If you're not Xander the psycho, then who are you?"

Now that got a raised eyebrow. "Psycho?" I barked. "Ha! Never been called that before. I'm Albert. And we have work to do, so hop to it, girl. No time for yap."

And so we went to work, though Cordelia looked less than convinced. We dumped a table in front of the door and a couple of chairs had joined it before Lady Useless spoke up. "Surely there's somewhere we can go?" she asked. "A safe haven?"

"You know the terrain, lady?" I asked. "Because I don't. The ghost-girl was our local and she's gone. We're stuck here just like she said."

"You would take orders from a woman?" she asked. "Are you feeble in some way?"

"Do I look feeble?" I asked, feeling somewhat put out. "I save the world and this is the thanks I get. Kids these days. No respect for their elders."

Actually, that made a nice change. Arroyo had been disgustingly respectful towards me. Actually, respectful didn't even begin to cover it. Obsequious didn't even cover it. They'd treated me like I was some sort of supreme being because I'd been the one with the skills back when things were hard at the beginning. That and the whole mess with the water chip and the Super-mutants, but whatever.

"You save the world? Please," said Cordelia. "You can't even find clothes with a decent colour scheme."

I was about to snap off a witty reply - well, I thought it was witty - when I caught a glimpse of the picture that Lady Useless had been looking at earlier and I stopped in my tracks. A closer look at the picture told me all I needed to know. Of the four people in it, one was Lady Useless, one was Willow, and another was the cowboy. It didn't take a genius to work out that the other guy in the picture was probably this Xander they kept talking about, or, in other words, me.

"She must be right," I said. "No delusion would be this well done. Shit. I was really hoping it was a delusion too."

"Your language is most uncouth," said Lady Useless.

"You just noticed?" I asked. "Christ, this makes no sense. How the hell could we have ended up here? Don't suppose you girls have any ideas?""

"I don't!" said Lady Useless. And on came the hysterics. Just what we needed. "I was brought up a proper lady. I-I wasn't meant to understand things. I'm just meant to look pretty, and then someone nice will marry me. Possibly a Baron."

I couldn't help but gawk at her. Honestly, she wouldn't have lasted five minutes where I was from. What could I say to it though? She was beyond my capacity for words.

"And I thought you were an annoying freak before!" snapped Cordelia. "If you think I'm going to risk breaking a nail to save your scrawny little neck, think again."

Lady Useless sniffed and crossed her arms. "I'd rather die than fight these low creatures."

Before I could say anything, a tall, dark-haired man came out of the door near Lady Useless. I immediately raised my rifle into position and fired a three bullet burst into his heart. I didn't recognise him and I wasn't taking any chances. My gut instinct said the guy was wrong, and I'd long since learned to listen to that. He staggered back and turned away slightly, but he didn't fall. When he faced me again, his face was all distorted and I could see fangs in his mouth. That was it. I unloaded the entire magazine into him at virtually point-blank range. He went down.

As I ejected the magazine and set about inserting a new one, Cordelia and Lady Useless screamed. Lady Useless was absolutely incoherant but Cordelia was gibbering something about angels. Whatever. Before I had my rifle reloaded, the man was up and, yeah, he looked pissed. "Oh, that's it," he said, and then he punched me. I'd never seen anyone move that fast and I'd never been hit so hard in all my life. I went one way and my rifle went the other.

The next few moments were a bit of a blur. I was seeing some serious stars after that hit and really wasn't with it. Next thing I knew, I heard a pistol firing and saw the bastard that'd punched me put down on his knees. I'd never know how, but I managed to get back to my feet right then and grab my rifle. Without a moment's hesitation, I smashed it butt-first into the bridge of the man's nose and he went down. And I kept slamming it down again and again. If he could survive having a near-full magazine emptied into him, one hit wouldn't keep him down for long. He sure as hell wasn't human and I had no idea what it was going to take to finish the bastard off. And all the while, Lady Useless kept screaming, though now it was more coherant. "Vampire, vampire!" she kept repeating.

"Think that should do it," said the gunman, eventually, breaking my red haze. I looked down and I had to agree. I'd made quite the mess of the bastard's face. He wasn't going to be giving us much trouble for a while.

"He was our friend," cried Cordelia.

"He's a vampire!" shrieked Lady Useless. "He has to be destroyed before he kills us all!"

"A _what_?" barked the gunman.

"He'll kill us all!" she cried, clearly beyond rational thought.

He was already moving. Slowly and sluggishly, he was getting up. Christ. "How do I kill it?"

"He's our friend," gibbered Cordelia.

Okay, no-one was offering anything useful. I finished reloading my rifle and levelled it at his head. "Don't move," I shouted. "Don't even think about moving."

"What the hell is wrong with you?" gasped the vampire. It was pretty hard to make out to be honest. No great surprise considering I'd just tenderised his face with my rifle.

"I'm not the one with fangs," I said. "Explain. Now. A name would be a good start."

"I'm Angel," he said quickly. Smart man. I wasn't in a mood to wait. "I'm a good vampire. Really. I have a soul. I'm no threat to you. I couldn't come in here unless I was invited."

"Cordelia?" I barked, not taking my eyes off the creature in front of me.

"He . . . Buffy said . . . it can't be true!"

"What did she say?" I hissed venomously. "Tell me."

"She said he was a vampire," she replied quickly.

"And did she say he was dangerous?"

"No," said Cordelia. "But vampire! Dangerous and vampire go together. Duh."

"I say we fill him so full of lead that he can't keep getting back up," said the gunman. "Save ourselves any more trouble."

"I'm inclined to agree," I said. "Got anything to say, Angel?"

"Look, Buffy's the Slayer," he said. "If I was dangerous, she'd have killed me not invited me into her home."

"This whole invite thing don't mean shit to me. You could be spinning any sort of story and I wouldn't know."

"It's true," said Cordelia. "They have to be invited to enter a home."

Well it all seemed to fit, and I was buggered if I knew how to finish the guy off anyway. Best I could tell, we were just pissing him off. Looked like he'd be up and about and able to kick the shit out of me in short order, so what else could I do? "Right," I said. "One dodgy move and I'll drop you, Angel. Till then, do what you will."

What a fucking situation. On one side, I had a guy who'd probably shoot me as quick as he'd shoot the enemy. On another, I had something straight out of a horror novel. And on the final, I had a couple of useless females that spent more time screeching than fighting. Some days, it just doesn't pay to get out of bed.

* * *

"So what's the story?" asked Angel from the corner he was lurking in.

"Psycho-boy's even more psycho than normal, dweeb-boy thinks he's Clint Eastwood, and slay-gal's turned into a living, breathing insult to feminism," said Cordelia with a bright smile. "Oh, and my date turned into a monster. It's a great night. Almost as good as the time an army of vampires chased me into the library."

Angel blinked. Yeah, that was about how I felt too. She did have a way with words that girl. And he was already healing up. Jesus. Damn good thing the Master didn't have vampire stock to build his mutant army from. Don't think even my old plasma rifle would have been enough against a Super-mutant army made from people that could heal like that before they were dipped.

"Look on the bright side," I said. "If whatever the hell did this could do this, it could probably have made us into stuff a whole lot worse."

Oh there was a thought. There might have been Super-mutants running around the town. Well, God help anyone that ran into those things. Wasn't much else going to, because I was loaded for bear, not giant monster that can soak up bullets like a sponge and keep on coming. And my armour wouldn't have lasted two seconds against one of their mini-guns.

"Oh, that's nice," said Cordelia. "Look on the bright side, we got a psycho with a gun instead of Godzilla. That's real nice."

Then the lights went out. I heard Lady Useless whimper, but before I could do anything I was consumed by a blinding headache. I couldn't help but let out an involuntary groan. And there was something up with the shadows. I couldn't figure it out, but something wasn't quite right.

"What's wrong?" asked the gunman.

"Feels like someone's stabbing an icepick into my brain," I grunted. "Hurts like no headache I've ever had before."

"Oh hell," said Angel. "I don't suppose you're good with a sword?"

"Pointy end goes in the other guy."

Honestly, swords. Who the hell used swords? I don't think anyone in the wastes knew how to properly use one of those things. Knifes, sure, but swords? What was the point? If you could find a sword that'd actually stand up to being used, you'd just get shot when you tried. Waste of time. Good way to get yourself killed though. My headache was getting worse and worse.

"It's another one of the freak-brigade?" asked Cordelia, her voice and expression making a lie of her irreverent word choice. The pain was almost blinding me as she spoke. "Oh great. Psycho boy really does have no end of enemies."

And then the front door exploded inwards. The man that stepped through looked like something out of a nightmare. He was an absolute monster. Not as large as a Super-mutant, but still way, way bigger than any normal man I'd ever seen. And he was wearing some sort of heavy, metal armour - plate, I thought, though I'd never seen such a thing in person - that made him look even larger. And he was carrying a sword, though that word hardly did the thing justice. It was a beast of a weapon.

"Roman, you look ridiculous," he said with a twisted smile on his face. And then he laughed. Christ, it sounded like he was gargling rocks.

The gunman's response was quick and simple. He immediately, and with absolutely blinding speed, fired all six rounds from his pistol into the man's chest. Didn't even knock him off-balance.

"What witchcraft is this?" asked the man, laughing all the while. "It is pathetic."

Well, I didn't know him, but he was giving me the shits. I levelled my rifle and let him have it on full auto. That, at least, knocked him off-balance. But that was about it. Maybe the armour protected him a bit. I didn't know. The ammo you find in the wastes isn't exactly the good stuff and I'd long since worked through what the Brotherhood had allocated me.

"Ah, that stings," he laughed. "Draw that sword. Fight like a man."

Well, I was buggered. Rifle was out of ammo, and ineffective anyway, so what could I do? Doubted my pistol could do much better and a knife somehow didn't seem to be the thing for fighting a sword that looked to be almost as big as me.

"On your back," said Angel. "The sword's there."

"I knew that," I said. I didn't, but, hey, it's easy to miss stuff when your world's being turned upside down.

Okay, my sword was a whole lot smaller than his. That just wasn't sporting. I tried to replicate his ready stance, but the whole thing was just awkward. I'd never so much as held a sword before in my whole life, and it showed. The man's mocking laughter really pissed me off too.

"If I'm to die, then I would at least like to know the name of my killer," I said from between clenched teeth.

"I am the Kurgan!"

And then he attacked with an overhand swing. I blocked it with the flat of my blade and it actually knocked the damn thing out of my hands. He brought the sword around and rested it on my shoulder. My life was seriously flashing before my eyes.

"There can be only one," said the Kurgan with a demented smile before lifting his sword away in preparation for a final, killing blow. It really wasn't how I'd planned on going out. What a night.

Course, I wasn't going out that easy. Before he could bring the sword down and cut my head off, I yanked my pistol out of its holster and put a bullet 'tween his eyes. That dropped him. Ha! Mess with the best, die like the rest.

"Never bring a sword to a gunfight," I said with a somewhat cocky smile on my face. Hey, can't blame me for being a bit giddy after a near-death experience. I turned back away from Kurgan. "Well, that-"

"I'll keep that mind," I heard an all too familiar force say from behind me.

I turned around quick as I could, but before I could open fire he smashed the gun out of my hand with his sword - a move that just about cut a couple of my fingers off - and laughed at me. Well, I'd given it my best shot. Didn't look like there was much else I could do though. I couldn't see any weak spots to slip a knife into and I wasn't sure I would be able to move quickly enough to do so. In short, I was fucked.

Then Angel flew past and attacked the Kurgan. It was a valiant stand, to be sure, but it was pretty much futile. When one superhuman has a big sword and heavy armour and the other doesn't . . . well, it doesn't take a genius to figure out how it ends. Angel managed to land some wicked looking punches, but a sword through his gut pretty much brought an end to that little flurry. He would have been decapitated, but I owed him one for that little attack. I used my good hand to draw my knife and I then hurled it at the Kurgan. It wasn't a throwing knife, and I was a lousy shot with those nevermind anything else, so it just ended up clanging off his armour, but, hey, saved the guy who saved me if nothing else.

The Kurgan just smiled widely at me and advanced. The gunman fired out another round of shots from his pistol, but they just got ignored. As I backpedalled, I noticed that my ruined hand was healed. Was I one of the local freaks? Well, there was no time to ponder that.

"You've let yourself get soft, Roman. So very soft."

I resolved at that point to leave a note for my host if I survived. "Stop making so many damn enemies," it'd say. I'd saved the damn world without making enemies like this guy. And then I heard laughter, horrible, mocking laughter, and it seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

"Do you really think that I would allow you to kill my master?" said a voice, echoing from all corners of the house at once. And then more laughter. "Gutter trash like you?"

Angel was just about crawling up the walls and I couldn't blame him. The shadows were _moving _and there was an absolutely overwhelming feeling of wrongness in the air as they began to coalesce at a single point between myself and the Kurgan. And all the while, the mocking laughter continued. Eventually the shadows took on a human shape and then formed into a person. A tall man in a long red coat and a hat of the same colour. I could see a hint of fangs in the newcomer's mouth as he shot the Kurgan a mad, mocking smile full of arrogance.

The Kurgan reacted pretty much as you would expect a violent, sword-wielding lunatic to react to a challenge. He charged, sword held high in preparation for a decapitating strike. Then the man in the red coat just _moved_. One moment he was stood stock still and the next he had slammed his fist through the Kurgan's armour and out the other side through the pyscho's chest.

The Kurgan's mouth dropped open in shock and blood dripped copiously from it. That had to be it, I thought. Not even one of the freak patrol could survive having someone punch through their chest. I'd have been so lucky. The Kurgan stayed stunned for a long moment, but then his mouth curved into a truly insane smile and he laughed. And then he, in a movement that should have been impossible in his position, brought his sword around and lopped the red-coated man's head off in a single, one-handed strike. I almost cried. It just wasn't my day.

The Kurgan laughed as he pushed the red-coated man's body away. He laughed as he pulled an arm out of his chest. And then he fell back against the wall and stuck his freakishly long tongue at me. "You have many allies," he said. "But they're all as weak as you."

Well, with that in mind, I had only one option: I shot him again, right between the eyes. When he slumped to the ground, grin still plastered across his face, I approached and emptied the rest of my pistol's clip into his head at close range, reducing it to a bloody pulp.

"That should do it," I said. "Least I hope so." I turned back to the others. "Let's get the hell out of here."

There were no arguments there. I could see the fear in their eyes, especially in Angel's He knew something the rest of us didn't. Well, no time for an interrogation right then. We had to move. I gathered my weapons from where they'd fallen and then we moved out. It took some serious persuasion to get Lady Useless moving, but I eventually managed it.

* * *

"Arr, I'll be having ye money now," said the pirate, waving an extremely primitive looking gun at us.

I just stared. It was a true 'what the fuck' moment if there'd ever been one in my life. Of all the weird things that had happened that night, this one was the weirdest. Before I could react beyond gaping, the gunman stepped forward and, with a single punch, knocked the pirate out cold.

"That was far more satisfying than it should have been," he noted before Willow showed up again. I had no idea how she'd found us but whatever. We hadn't exactly worried too much about stealth.

"Guys, you gotta get inside," she said.

I looked around. Well, there were plenty of abandoned-looking warehouses in the area. I was plenty familiar with those if nothing else. Behind Willow, I saw a large gang of monsters coming alongside a couple of human-shaped things. Oh happy days. So much for outrunning the freak patrol.

Angel pointed out a warehouse and we followed. As we moved, the gunman sidled over ti me. "I'm almost out of bullets," he said quietly.

I frowned. "Shit," I said. "I haven't got much left either."

It was shaping up to be a very bad situation and I didn't see any way out of it. I hadn't exactly packed for a war and it wasn't like I could stop off at the nearest gun runner for more ammunition. Bad times.

We moved quickly into a warehouse and started barricading the entrance with what bits we could find, but it didn't take a genius to know that it wouldn't be enough. The stuff we were shoving in front of the door wasn't all that heavy to start with and we didn't have the time to really pile it up. Shit. A few minutes after we started piling up the barricade something started banging against the doors and it only took a few seconds before the barricade starting bulging. I tried to hold it in place with the gunman, but it was futile. We were human; they weren't.

"Go!" I shouted and we ran.

* * *

We didn't get far. Lady Useless was just slow and we couldn't just leave her behind no matter how tempting it was. Battered and short on ammo, we were subdued way quicker than I would have liked. Certainly not a moment for the memoirs, that's for sure. Even worse, I was being held in place by a bunch of child-sized demons as were the gunman, who looked absolutely mortified to be subdued by such small creatures no matter how inhumanly strong they were, and Angel.

Lady Useless, on the other hand, was in a much worse position. The blond vampire that had been leading the group of monsters was giving her his undivided attention and she was entirely defenceless. "Look at you," he said, backing her into some crates. "Shaking. Terrified. Alone. Lost little lamb." There was nowhere further for her to go. She was trapped. The vampire slapped her across the face. "I love it," he said.

"Buffy!" shouted Angel, but he wasn't getting free any time soon. These midget monsters were freakishly strong.

The vampire leaned into her, I suppose to drink her blood or something, but before he could do anything, the man in the red coat who'd protected me earlier walked through the wall in front of us with a mad grin on his face. Yeah, I'd be grinning too if I got my head cut off and was none the worse for wear. Bloody freaks.

"William the Bloody," he said, his grin growing even wider. "Spike. I've been looking forward to this."

"What?" snapped the blond vampire. "I'm kinda busy here if you haven't noticed, so if you don't mind-"

"Oh, but I do," said the man in red, pulling an ungodly large semi-automatic pistol out from beneath his coat. "Gutter trash like you should know when to keep your mouths shut."

Spike backed away at a rather spectacular speed. "Now steady on," he said, hands up in a placating gesture. "We can talk this out, right? Like civilised monsters? I have no bloody idea what you're talking about."

The man in red aimed the pistol. "To think that trash like you would _dare _claim that I would sully myself by associating with filth like you."

"Jesus, Spike. I knew you were stupid, but this? Whole other level," said Angel.

"I have no idea what any of you wankers are talking about!"

"In the name of God, impure souls of the living dead shall be banished into eternal damnation," intoned the man in red with a mocking air. "Amen."

Before anything else could happen, the world twisted around me and then everything went dark.

* * *

Fuck! I'd been caught with my pants down, hadn't even been able to offer a token resistance to the fucking spell, and now a century of work had came crashing down around me. Alucard knew. How much he knew I didn't know, but even the slightest morsel of information was enough to blow all the work I'd put into escaping Hellsing to smithereens. And to top it off, I'd almost lost my head to a monster that'd been dead for years. When I caught the mage responsible, he would die a long, slow death.

I shrugged the children-turned-monsters-turned-children that were holding onto my sleeves off and evaluated the situation. Buffy was beating the hell out of Spike, the other vampire had been destroyed in the initial struggle, and the other hostiles had been completely neutralised by the termination of the spell. I was free and clear of any danger by the look of things.

It didn't take long for Spike to make a break for it and Buffy didn't look to be of a mind to give chase. I wasn't either, to be honest. I had a lifetime of memories to integrate and it wasn't going to be pleasant. Albert had seen the world after it had effectively ended. Living through the collapse of the Roman Empire really didn't have diddly on living in a post-apocalyptic hellhole.

"Hey, Buffy," said Jesse. "Welcome back."

"Yeah," replied Buffy. "You too."

"You guys remember what happened?" asked Cordelia.

"Oh yeah," said Jesse. "Very creepy stuff. It was like I was there but couldn't get out."

"Yeah, I know the feeling," replied Cordelia. "This outfit's totally skintight."

And we all appreciated it. When the bile stopped spewing, Cordelia was a very attractive young lady. Even if she was _way_ too young for me.

"You okay, Xander?" asked Buffy. "You look kinda creeped."

"I'm fine," I said, snapping my attention back to the real world and away from the memories floating around my head.

"What was with that creepy guy in the red?" asked Cordelia.

"That's a subject for another time," I said. "Tomorrow in the library after school, I think."

Sooner would have been better, but I wanted to go through it once and once only and there was no guarantee I'd even be able to find Giles and Willow that night.

"You're actually going to tell us stuff about your past voluntarily?" asked Jesse. "I think hell just froze over."

"Kinda unavoidable now," I said with a grimace. "Come on, let's get these kids back."

* * *

The chat about Alucard was one that I really wasn't looking forward to. Who wants to be the one that tells a Slayer that there are vampires that could squish an army of her like so many bugs? So much fun and yet so little I could do to avoid it. Ah well. The whole gang gathered and I found myself tasked with the rather unenviable of dishing the goods.

"As you all know, I've been alive for a very long time," I started. "What some of you know, and most don't, is that I was once a member of the Hellsing family. Abraham van Helsing, to be exact, the founder of the line."

"And this matters, why?" asked Cordelia.

"Because the Hellsing family holds the leash of quite possibly the most powerful creature in the world," I snapped. "Alucard was operating at a tiny fraction of his true power last night and you saw what he could do then. He could make the Master look like a rank amateur without even trying."

"And they thought you were dead," said Giles. "This complicates matters."

"No shit," I said. "Finding out the Abraham van Helsing wasn't, strictly speaking, human? They'll be all over the place like white on rice sooner rather than later. I've been trying to avoid this for nearly a hundred years and one random wanker with a penchant for chaos ruined it all. He shows up again and I'm killing him."

"Whoa, whoa, time out," said Jesse. "Hellsing? Alucard? Explain, please."

"The Royal Order of Protestant Knights," I said. "Hellsing. They are the British Crown's response to the vampire threat. I founded it on direct orders from Queen Victoria."

"Like the Watcher's Council then?" asked Buffy.

I shook my head. "No," I said. "The vampires Hellsing faces are altogether more dangerous than the ones you face. They transcended their demon long ago and harnessed an altogether more potent source of power: human souls. First their own and then those of their victims. Incredibly unpleasant and also incredibly dangerous."

"They're not demons?"

"Not for at least a thousand years," I said. "They totally transcended the need for the demon at about that time, I think."

"So what can they do?" asked Jesse. "How strong are they?"

"Stronger than Buffy by a few orders of magnitude," I said. "I'm not joking when I say that a lot of them could rip her apart like she was made of tissue paper. Powers vary a lot from vampire to vampire though. I've seen telekinesis, teleportation, hypnosis, telepathy, regeneration, phasing, the use of demonic familiars, and probably a lot more that I'm forgetting. You really don't want to pick a fight with one. It's not worth it. Believe me, I know."

"How do I kill one?" asked Buffy. "Usual?"

"Stakes are generally effective," I said. "But decapitation's more reliable. Very few of them can regenerate from that." Buffy looked gob-smacked. "Yeah, I know. Hard to believe, but some can survive having their head removed. Remember last night? Alucard got his head cut off and was back on his feet by the time Spike had us. That was slower than usual for him. Hmm, what else? Oh, fire. Nothing likes being set on fire. Fire will kill most. Sunlight's no good though. Irritates their eyes something fierce, but that's about it unless they're _really _weak."

"Holy symbols work too," said Giles. "In fact, the use of firearms with blessed ammunition is the method recommended by the Council."

"That works," I said. "There are a few who can shrug holy stuff off, but they're damned rare. Blessed silver is the real killer. That's Hellsing's material of choice."

"If these super-vampires are so powerful, how come they haven't take over?" asked Jesse. "Vampires aren't exactly known for restraint."

"Because they're a bit noticeable," I said. "Things were a bit hairy when they first started popping up, but people got on top it eventually. There are organisations in place that force them to keep their heads under the parapet. That's where Hellsing comes in. And they have no interest in causing an apocalypse so they steer well clear of hellmouths."

"You still haven't told us who Alucard is," said Buffy.

"That's classified," I said. "But I can tell you that he's an _extremely_ powerful vampire and that it would be a _very _bad idea to try and slay him. The only real limits to his power these days come from the magic that binds him into the service of the Hellsing family."

"And you think that your presence here will draw their attention," said Giles. "Possibly hostile attention."

"Oh, I doubt they'll be hostile," I said. "Well, maybe a little. A smidgen. More likely they'll try to drag me back to London. The head of the family is rather young yet, you see. She's not quite twenty yet and I'm quite sure that there are many who'd be more comfortably seeing an older man in charge than teenage girl. The fact that I'm not quite human by their standards and have been hiding from what they will see as my duty for decades . . . well, that just weakens my position if I go back. Politics. I'm not without my resources, however. They won't control me."

"I'll get in touch with the Council," said Giles. "Their influence is considerable and I would like to influence their position before other sources reveal this to them."

I nodded. "The rabbit's out of the hat now. No point in pretending otherwise."


End file.
